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they do want life and movement. There is something to me quite depressing in their stillness. The beautiful trees seem made in vain, with no living things to frolic around them or lie under their shade, and the eye quite thirsts for water. How oddly, too, the stones and rocks are seated on the turf, as if they had been taken from their native bed, and placed there by some giant who had been playing at bowls with them.

VI.

Cholera and Infection-Need of Sanitary Improvements-Evening Walks at Herne Bay-Sisterhoods - Remarks of Sir Francis Palgrave on the Resurrection of the Body, and on the Gospel Narratives of the Healing of Demoniacs-A Last View of Herne Bay Home and Social Duties Archbishop Trench on the Miracles-Associations with Places-Love and Praise.

TO AUBREY DE VERE, Esq.

Herne Bay, September 18th, 1849.-Here I am still, kept here for a week longer than I intended by the encroachments of that fiend cholera, and the advice of our careful medical friend, Mr. N, who expressed his regret to my servants that I should return to town when the disorder was on the increase. I, for my part, believe that the cholera atmosphere is all over England, and that the complaint kills off most people where there are most people to kill, and in the most unfavourable circumstances in regard to diet, clothing, and the air of their dwellings. I strongly suspect that the disorder is in some degree infectious, since one hears so often of many dying in one house, and sometimes when there seems to be no special cause of malaria. I have been saying to John that it is an ill wind that blows no sort of good, and that it is to be hoped the present pestilence will improve the drainage of England. Yet how little is done and doing in this way compared to what ought to be! If men would but expend as much energy and ingenuity upon this subject, or half as much, as they do upon making money fast, or adding to the sum of amuse

ments and luxuries, what a blessed, odoriferous nation we should be! I speak feelingly, dear friend, and beg you will feel for me, and for my E- and our good Nurse, for Herne Bay, in a high wind blowing inland, as at present, resembles a certain compartment in a certain circle of Dante's "Inferno" in point of olfactory horribleness. E and I have to fly like chaff before the wind, when we pass certain parts of the town, which we must pass daily to post our letters, and to strike into the two best walks of the neighbourhood. I wonder whether the drainage of this good land, and the sewerage, and all that sort of thing, will ever be so perfected as to prevent all escape of noisome vapours. I often day-dream what England will be five hundred years hence, whether it will be free from coalsmoke, from butcher's meat exhibited openly in the street, from the abominations of Smithfield market, from rookeries like St. Giles, from nuisances affecting the atmosphere of every sort and kind, and I am sure if there are seventy different species in Cologne, there must be seven thousand in London. But stop! let me turn the current of my thoughts into a better channel, or rather, let me open a different spring and display a clearer, fresher stream, which will make its own banks green and flowery, and fit for your eye to rest on.

Imagine us on our evening walk out upon the East Cliff, a mile and a half from our present abode. We have passed a rough pathway, and weary of a long, low hedge, the very symbol of sameness and almost of nothingness, have struck in by a breach which the sailors, who sit there with their observatory telescopes, have made upon the grassy cliff, and are looking upon the sea and sky and straggling town of Herne Bay. The ruddy ball is sinking, over it is a large, feathery mass of cloudage that was swansdown, but now, thrilled through with rosy light, resembles pinky crimson flames, and the dark waters below are tinged with rose

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colour. In the distance appears the straggling town with its tall watch, or rather, clock-tower, and its long pier like a leviathan centipede walking out into the waves. This time we are home before dark. Another evening we set out later, and by the time we descend the cliff it is dark, and as we are pacing down the velvet path, as we call the smooth, grassy descent, which leads to the town, there is Nurse in her black cloak waving in the wind, moving towards us through the dusk like a magnified bat. As we pass the town, what a chrysolite sky is before us, passing off above into ultra-marine, spangled with one or two stars, and below into a belt of straw-colour and orange above the horizon, over the ỏívoτα πоντоν. Then we enter our lodging and begin to feel

"Com'è duro calle.

So scendere e il salir per le altrui scale.” Thirty-six steps, steep ones, too, have we to ascend to our sleeping apartments.

Then see us on the West Cliff. Just below us is a collection of huts, where live a set of people who gain a poor maintenance by picking copperas from the beach and cliff. When I first looked upon this hovelage, think I, this is like an Irish hamlet, and the people have an Irish look about them. Afterwards I heard that they were Irish, and that the old Nelly, who so gladly received the scraps and fragments from our not very extravagant repasts, is from the good town of Cork. It seems that she went not long ago to her mother-land, and there received such unnatural treatment that she was very fain to turn her back upon it. And now she applies a transitive verb that begins with d, the harsher form of the verb condemn, both to Ireland in general, and to Cork in particular.

Wednesday evening.-Right glad were we this evening on the East Cliff to welcome back the moon from her “interlunar cave." Lovely gleamed her crescent in the chrysolite

depth above the crimson, yellow border of the vault serene. The sea was darkly steel coloured, and all the vessels upon it looked black. How much do they lose who walk out only in the full daylight!

I am writing to dear Miss Fenwick, and wish to interest her for poor M. S, who has lately lost her mother, and is left quite desolate and destitute. She tried a religious establishment, but found the life too hard, and fell ill there. Now she is trying another. But she complains of want of fresh air, it is evident she only remains there for a home. She has sent me a plan of hours, showing how the time of the inmates is to be spent, and indeed it must require a burning zeal to render such a life tolerable. It is not so much the hardness and laboriousness that must be trying, though it is hard and laborious, but the dryness, the monotony,— nothing but private devotions and public, parish visiting and teaching. The only relaxation almost is reading aloud, with the needle. It is a pity that the bow is bent so tight; or at least it is a pity that there cannot be an honourable retreat of this kind, where persons who have no home of their own, no domestic duties to fulfil, might take refuge and be useful, without being worn out by requirements more than can be well complied with by any one but the very strong, or those who gain an unnatural feverish strength from zeal, and what some will consider fanaticism. I believe that worldly people much misjudge the zealous members of these institutions, but still I think that such systems cannot answer in the long run, except by aid of superstition, if to succeed by superstition is to succeed at all. Whenever they withdraw active, earnest-minded women from home duties, or service to those with whom they are connected by blood or early intimacy, or claim of gratitude, they are doing, I think, most serious mischief, for which they never can compensate.

September 21st.-A note from Sir Francis Palgrave this

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morning. He says "The Antiquarian theologian will tell you what he means by a celestial body, when the scientific philosopher of the nineteenth century shall have explained the nature of the ultimate atoms of which the matter constituting a terrestrial body is composed." Now, I had not been complaining of the Antiquarian that he does not attempt to explain the celestial body. I remarked that he does attempt, not to explain, but to describe the celestial body, or rather takes it for granted that it is describable and conceivable by our present senses and faculties,-that it is a sort of improved, brightened, subtilized, glorified, earthly body, having the same form and lineaments, visible and tangible, as our present body. The question is, whether this notion is not disclaimed by St. Paul, and negatived by reason and by philosophy.

Sir Francis says too, "The theologian of the nineteenth century, who explains away narratives of demoniacal possession in the Gospels, is on the verge of explaining away the Gospels altogether." The subject often causes me anxiety, because I feel that it is going very far to believe that our Lord spoke as if He entertained the popular belief, while the popular belief was a delusion ;—going far, though only on the same road that all must enter who would reconcile the language of Scripture on many other subjects with truth of science. Still the case is not so bad, not at all such as Sir Francis says it is, if by "explaining away" he means understanding the demoniacs to have been madmen possessed with a belief that they were possessed by evil spirits, or, what is common with the insane, that they were evil spirits themselves. All that is related by the Evangelists may have taken place,—a miracle been performed of which the moral purport, the use and aim, is the same as it would be on the popular supposition. Our Lord healed a madman, and sent the spirit of madness into the swine, probably in order to render the display of His