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“— MYSTIC, WONDERFUL! ”

In his essay “Concerning Churchyards,” A. K. H. B. writes, “In these days of the misty and spasmodic school, I owe my readers an apology for presenting them with poetry which they will have no difficulty in understanding.” A shallow author, indeed, merely to quote matter that anybody can easily comprehend! Well may he declare a few pages previously that he is “a very commonplace person!” He never could turn out such a powerful article as “A Summer Night on the Thames,” in the present number of the Cornhill Magazine, which combines a masterly solution of some of our most difficult social problems in Carlyle's fashion (called by certain unthinking, ribald minds the “newly-macadamized style,” from the going over it being so very heavy), with the inscrutable flights of Emerson, and the dreamy beauty of the best passages in Hyperion. This article is a rare intellectual treat, which we cordially recommend to all lovers of the Infinite, the Metaphysical, and the Beautiful. One of our contributors has attempted the following brief essay in the same school. It is, however, too intelligible, and, consequently, lacks the truth, practical sense, and talent of the great work of which professedly it is an imitation; but it should be leniently regarded as the effort of a mere youth, ambitious, though as yet only a guinea-a-liner.

A SUMMER NIGHT IN A SEWER.

If only the Summer would not make a man so hot! If only it would make us less thirsty, less inclined to drink more beer than our heads can stand! For the overmuch of beer is confused thought and headaches; and it is very difficult sometimes in magazine writing to know what we really do mean, and not to look daft in the eyes of the public.

It was very hot, when our other us whispered in the words of Sydney Smith, “Let us take off our flesh and sit in our bones.” Of course, this is merely a figurative expression. I hope there will be no misapprehension about this. For when he joked, Sydney Smith never bubbled over with irrepressible fun; he always had a deep, laboured meaning; Here he simply meant that we should divest the universe of its tertiary formation, and break off or liaison with the Devil's Mother-in-law; at least, we both think so—we and our other us.

And on this hot evening, when Nature is simmering herself to sleep, how good and grand it is to see old Sally, the charwoman, lave the doorsteps with a cool flannel swab! I will not talk too much of her beautiful large figure and hand lest the world should think I have borrowed from “Companions of my Solitude” (Hush! 'Tis the Enemy. I know you. Bo!). She is adored by a brave, helpful, hideous cabman, whose solace in love is Geneva. Is not that noteworthy?

I shall have a bad night with him—that other One, the Devil's Advocate (an acute attorney-at-law, believe me). I cannot sleep with him; he almost persuades me that I have a grain of sense. And yet my bed is comfortable. The sheets have lain so long in lavender that they smell of the earth—of course, and not of lavender. It is easy to tell from what planet we came; we are moon-struck. And yet our robe de nuit will at least bear patching.

To avoid the heat, the overmuch, and an uneasy bedfellow, I sat in the fireplace to be cool and dignified; and from my window gazed down into the new High Level Sewer works, open and dimly lanternlit. Said we to other us—using bad grammar—“We won't lay here; we have our pure longings, and, to escape the devil's Legal Adviser, will spend the night in the sewer.”

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It was nothing o'clock. The solid, angular sewer glittered in its fragile walls. It was like nothing so much as a whale. As both we and our other us—drew near to the wharves by the river's side, the cool night breeze made me long for scarves and handkerchieves to tie around my throat. I am enamoured by the sewer and its virgin purity. My coy one, do you flow on towards the ambling ocean sward? O beer! O skittles! I hear the sound of wings. 'Tis a bee in my bonnet! Again, O beer! O skittles!

(“The eleventy-fifteenth of Septober * * * * * Alas! I havn't six and eightpence about me— Legal Adviser, avaunt!”)

More wharves! (as I said only once before); mere dwarves to the others, yet still infinite, quasi-rhythmical, all-precious. Chaos reverts ere glutful greed with social pathos chuckles out the poet's shriek we must speak out sometimes); while life and love ever purposeful, seethingly convey to the crumpled mind these spasms of crude thought. We are at the sewer's mouth again.

And this will all be printed. Altogether, what terrible "hum" it will be.

Here, O night watchman! In this pocket-book you will find thrice the amount. I return to Hanwell by the first up flash of thunder.