University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.

Month after month passed away, year after year, and
though I went much into public in the hope of seeing somebody
with or without a veil to remind me of her that I saw
in the shadowy depth of Westminster-Abbey, and for full
three years never entered a theatre, a ball-room, nor a church,
nor any other place where the beautiful and high-bred congregate
for show, without recalling her proud step and
haughty carriage at the door, the trepidation that she betrayed
when she saw me approach, although she stood up like
another Cleopatra to receive me,1 and her loving affectionate
way—the deep humility of her manner, so long as she thought
herself unobserved: for three whole years! and in all that time,
I had met with nobody to remind me of her—no shape like
hers—no tread like hers—no love like hers—nothing to make
my heart leap and thrill as it did when she passed by me
without seeing me, though I stood near enough to lay my
hand upon hers without stretching forth my arm.

At last, after I had given up all thought of ever seeing her
again—all hope I should say, for it was hope, and a hope that
I could not bear to part with, even while I knew that I was
behaving more like a great green boy, or a youthful poet crazy
with such love as they retail in the toy-shops and circulating-libraries,
than like what I was—a man of the world—a circumstance
brought us together.

I had long been wishing to see the Isle-of-Wight; and by
the merest accident in the world I found myself there in the
beautiful autumn of eighteen hundred and twenty —.
Such weather I had never seen before out of America. It
was the very counterpart of our Indian-summer, that we brag
so much of. I do not know what other men may feel, but
I feel in the rich drowsy atmosphere of that particular season
very much as if I could make love to any body or any thing
that fell in my way. To breathe was a luxury. To tread the
green turf, to walk under the great beech-trees that overshadowed
my path, to look up at the sky and out upon the
sea, from every side of “the Garden of England,” as they
call it there—a miniature picture of England, I should call
it—was to be happy, to be charitable, and to be at peace with
all the world—authors excepted. For about a week we had
had a regular alternation of good weather and bad weather—
first a rainy day and then a fair day. Of course therefore
we were trebly happy when a fair day did arrive; and at
every change from fair to foul, we had so little to hope for
the morrow, that if the morrow turned out fair, it was enough
to make a fellow jump for joy. Every clear sunshiny day
was a miracle, after a day of white fog and heavy rain, such
as we had had every other twenty-four hours for a whole week;
and every body knows or should know that miracles do not
last for ever.

I had gone to bed with a secret fear that my trip
was all over, that I had come rather too late in the season
for such a tour as other people talked of, and that the next
day could not by any possibility be fair—the chances were a
million to one; for the day before had been a beautiful day,
and the day but one before that, and the day but one before
that; every other day for a week, while every intervening
day was bad—very bad—much too bad for the travellers of

our age. Of course therefore, when I packed off to bed,
though I desired to be called at six on the morrow—if it
should happen to be clear—I had no great hope for the morrow.
But lo! on the morrow, when I awoke — I do
not say when they woke me, for they never do such things
in the Isle-of-Wight, nor on the way to the Isle-of-Wight, I
am sure. If you behave well, they do not like to part with
you, however much you may desire to part with them.
Nothing can persuade them to disturb your sleep—they are
too civil for that—and though you were to bribe all the chamber-maids,
all the boots, and all the porters between the Pavilion
Hotel at Brighton and the Bugle-Inn at Newport, or the
Sand-Rock Hotel (Of which a word or two more by and by),
you would have to wake yourself in the morning at a guess,
or lie half a day on the watch, afraid one hour of oversleeping
yourself, and the next, of being up too early for the waiters
and chamber-maids, or the coach, or the boot-black. What
a parenthesis — However, when I awoke, the whole
sky was bright with sunshine, the new air alive with it. I
never saw a finer day.

So I set off on my pilgrimage from Ryde,1 after running
down to the pier for the fourth time, to look at the Portsmouth
shore as it lay glittering afar off through the thin haze and
over the smooth beautifully-shadowed sea, like a sort of
aërial panorama.—Stop, reader—I must try to give you a notion
of Portsmouth as it appeared to me at the time I speak
of, whether you have or have not stood upon the pier at
Ryde, while the waters were spread before you like a sheet
of changeable satin—changeable with shadow and light and
with every hue between the deep yellow of the shore and
the deep strange blue of the sea—I must—I must—whatever

may become of my story, my heroine, or myself. Two
or three nights before, I had been struck with the amazing
beauty of a sunset, which I saw from the Portsmouth side—it
was like the sunsets of North American; not so brilliant however,
nor dyed with such exalted and fervent hues, but like
them in the stillness of their beauty, when to look at them is
enough to bring the water into your eyes and to make your
heart run over—especially if there is a woman at your
side. I grew melancholy, and I thought how very little we
know of each other in this world, nations of nations,
neighbours of neighbours, brothers of brothers. On every
side of me was the proof; on every side of me beauty
and power that were considered peculiar to America;
a real Indian-summer—that Sabbath of the whole year; a
superb sunset, and huge trees overloaded with foliage that appeared
like a sort of gorgeous blazonry. Their colors were
not so vivid as we have them in America, nor so various, nor
did they overhang all the mountain-sides, and all the rocks, and
every foot of the earth as far as the eye could reach, with a
sort of ponderous and fluctuating shadow; but they had a
beauty of their own, a beauty that we never see in the New-World,
a sort of pomp which is not the pomp of the wilderness,
and a sort of wealth which is not the wealth of our everlasting
woods, but graver and quieter. They swell up to
the eye, cloud over cloud, with colors that we love to see
in a picture. Not so with our savage North-American landscapes—they
would startle and scare you if they were painted
with fidelity. If you had gathered your ideas of nature
from Claude or Poussin or Hobbima, or Both, or Ruysdäl,
or from any body that ever painted a landscape in Europe,
you would never be able to endure the truth in a landscape
of North-America. The bright blue, the deep fiery crimson,
the scarlet and gold, the orange and purple, the innumerable
shades of brown would appear unworthy of a picture. You
would feel as men who have been brought up to the stage do,
when they see the terrible passions at work off the stage—
you would swear that Nature herself was unnatural.

So much for the sunset which I had seen two or three nights
before; but nothing that I saw then, though it was all that I
have described it to be, could equal the view that I had now
of the Portsmouth shore off Gosport, of the shipping, of the
military works, and of the far blue sea with a fleet riding
slowly over the dim barrier which hardly separated it from
the far blue sky—launching away, ship after ship into the
unfathomable air, as if they knew, like the huge birds of South-America
when they float over the top of the Andes—into the
sky—with all their mighty wings outspread, that there was no
power in heaven or earth able to wreck them, or shatter them,
or disturb them on their way. It was a picture to be remembered
for life—to be carried away on the heart, as if the colors
were burnt there, and the moveable beauty of a camera
obscura had been shut up for another day, or melted into the
material and fixed there for ever and ever.

The broad-striped waters were like a smooth satin, glossy
with light, and rippling with a low soft air that stole over the
green surface like a shadow. You could see it move. They
were green too—of a beautiful positive green, such as I never
saw any where else; no doubt owing to the mixture of a
sober yellowish dye produced by the sands near the shore
with the cold blue of the ocean—a blue that appeared as
black as midnight, where the waters were very deep. On
every side of me were happy faces—grown-up children
wading about on the shore, and looking as if they had never
heard the name of sorrow, as if to them life were but one
long holyday; barges and wherries dipping to the swell;
great ships at anchor with their sides turned up to the air as

if they had been cast away in the very middle of the great
deep; and others afar off towering into the sky like prodigies,
or floating up and fading away, like so many superb creatures
of the air, each abroad on some great particular errand of its
own.

The night before there had been a gale, which prepared
the way for what I saw now. I stood on the pier and saw
it approach—the breeze sounding over the deep, the mist
rolling toward me like a heavy white smoke, the tide moving
with a steady roar, which grew louder and louder as it heaved
and weltered underneath our feet; and the Portsmouth
shore, while it seemed very high and very far off, breaking
through the mist with an effect such as I never saw before,
either in life or in poetry, either in pictures or in sleep. The
sky was cloudy—it was even dark—there was nothing above
able to produce what I saw, nothing of brightness in that part
of the above which I could see; and yet the high lands of
the opposite shore, lands that were neither high nor picturesque
when the wind was another way, were gleaming with
a sort of mysterious beauty, such as you may conceive would
be the character of a fine painting, if it were covered with a
grey gauze and lighted up from within. It was what I should
call, if I were not afraid of being charged with affectation,
a sketch by the Deity, a shadow of the landscapes that we
are to see hereafter; so faint, so ethereal was it, so unlike the
landscapes of our earth.

After looking at what I have tried to describe, and feeling
what I have described, I turned away from the multitude who
were enjoying it with me, and was about leaving the pier,
when I saw a crowd of people pressing up over the end of it
in such numbers that I stopped to look at them. It appeared
as if they were coming up out of the sea, shoal after shoal,
or as if they had found a highway under the waters, a sort of

tunnel, such as they are to have under the bed of the Thames.
A three-year-old habit is not so easily thrown off as the
reader may imagine. I felt this, for before I well knew what
I was about, I found myself occupied once more in watching
every woman that passed me, while I stood on the top of
the broad green slippery stairs, at the bottom of which a
steam-boat and half a score of little galloping wherries were
discharging their live-stock. Off guard, if you please, reader.
I am laying no trap for you, though I am sure you
expect one. You are already more than half prepared
for a surprise, on the score of that heroine I told you
of. You foresee that I am going to find her at last among
the people of the steam-boat. No such thing, reader; I shall
do no such thing. Ah but, Mr. Author, a trap's a trap, and
you may as well catch us one way as another. You did
mean to bait for a serious, or mayhap for a pathetic interview;
but just when you had got to the pinch, either your heart failed
you, or you took it into your head that if you had been at
all anticipated by the reader it would be a capital joke to disappoint
him. So—that for your catastrophe,—snapping
your fingers—we are on our guard now. We are up to
your tricks.

No such thing reader, no such thing, I tell you. I had no
idea of the sort; for the truth of the story is, that I did see a
woman while I stood on the top of the stairs, waiting for the
approach of the boat—a woman whose air and step were
enough like the air and step of the proud creature I was in
search of, to make me feel as I had not felt for three years
before; but when I saw her face, and saw her look at me
without a tragedy-fling, I felt, I have an idea, pretty much
as the man felt, who had been very civil to a woman that
rode with him all night in a stage-coach, when there was daylight
enough to show him that the lady he had been so very

attentive to, was a thick-lipped Ethiope. Even so with me.
I could not bear to think of the imperial step I have said
so much of, nor of the august carriage I mean to say more of,
in the same week with the intrepid eye and little prim positive
mouth, and large feet of this woman of the sea. And so—that
my dream, which I still hoarded up as a mother would a sick
babe, the more because no other creature alive would care
a fig for it, my dream of what I would still go very far to see,
—a proud woman deeply, desperately, irretrievably in love,—
might not be wrecked for ever, and so wrecked as to leave
me no joy in the recollection of it, I hurried away from the
pier, leaving the feet, and the shape, and the face that I saw,
at the bottom of the stairs, to help one another up as they
best could over their slippery path; jumped into the first
coach I saw, and never looked behind me till it stopped in
Newport at the door of the Bugle-Inn—a very good house by
the by, and the only house that I know of in that part of the
world, where a man may get so much as a comfortable breakfast,
either for love or money, to say nothing of a tolerable
dinner. I do wish I could say a fortieth part as much of the
Pavilion-Hotel,1 or the Sand-Rock Hotel,2 houses that I
mean to bestow a paragraph upon before I leave the subject,
and houses that I shall dream of, I dare say, for the rest of my
life, whenever I am troubled with the night-mare. At the Bugle,
a very good house I say again, with a cordial gush of the heart,
for it was there I found what I had not seen for weeks before,
a good cup of tea, good cream, good bread, and good butter,
luxuries, downright luxuries to the traveller who has been a
week or two at Brighton, a day or two at Portsmouth, or a
single hour in the trap at Sand-Rock; a very good house,
believe me, (mind—I speak here of the Bugle) though even
there, if you go to bed in the hope of being called at a future
day, you may never be thought of again, or be told as they
told me, when you have got up an age too late (As if you
were one of those who go to bed when they have nothing
else to do, and get up—occasionally), that you had been
called half a day before, and that either you answered in your
sleep, or that somebody else answered for you—somebody
else who occupied one of the four-and-forty next-rooms,
every door of which opened either into yours or so as to darken
yours, and who had been so very obliging as to wake in
your place, and get up in your stead; a story which you are
obliged to be satisfied with, for a sure way of making the
affair forty times more disagreeable than ever a joke was yet,
would be to regard it as no joke: a very good house, after
all though, where I contrived to get a boy—for a guide, a
very decent horse, and a very tolerable gig.

Before two o'clock on that every day, the morning of which
operated on me as if I were breathing sunshine—the vitality of
the sky—I found myself stretched out with all my length upon
the little narrow unsteady seat, which is fixed near the verge of
the precipice at Shanklin-Chine, the flat wide sea before me,
and the waves breaking with a steady roar underneath my very
feet; a troop of young happy creatures below me,—far, far below
me, running about on the pebbly beach with their clothes up
to their knees, dipping their little dainty feet one after another
into the salt sea, and shaking them very much as a cat
would hers, or coquetting with a surge as it breaks afar off
and floats over their path till they are overtaken by a huge
wave or entrapped while pursuing it; when they stop
and cry out as if they were all overboard, drop their clothes
and scamper off with a backward step and a delightful show
of childish joy and yet more childish terror—wondering at

their own courage and rejoicing at their narrow escape; a
group here digging after shells for a trophy, or sea-weed for a
weathergage, or sifting the wet heavy sand through their
fingers, or wading about half-leg deep among the smooth pebbles
and white glossy gravel thrown up in huge furrows and
heaps all along the shore—feats to be told of when they have
got home: here a grave idler with a basket and a hammer,
a book and a magnifying-glass, abroad after flowers and butterflies
or bits of variegated flint; and there another group,
their cheeks flushed with joy and their eyes lighted with girlish
hope, ascending and descending by the hour—like the
shapes that were seen by the patriarch—between the top of
the cliff and the narrow beach below, and by a path as like a
ladder as a path could well be: here a cottage or two half
buried among the trees, and there a fisherman's hut which
appears either to have slipped down, hut hedges earth and
all, from the very top of the cliff, or to have been carried
where it is by a very high tide.

I grew sleepy. The sky and the waters, the blue deep
and the noise of the blue deep, the warm smooth atmosphere,
so like the breath of one you love, and the fatigue of the day
made me so; and as I did not like the idea of rolling over
the cliff into the nest of a sea-bird, or plump through the
fisherman's hut into the lap of somebody below; and as I
knew very well that if I did sleep, I should either dream of
that provoking mouth, or those ugly feet, which whenever I
shut my eyes appeared to be coming toward me, I got up,
shook myself, threw away my guide-book with a very audible
pshaw, and set off down the path, leap after leap, with a
feeling here—here—that I would not forego, if I might have
it again, for all the sober joy of a week wisely occupied—it
was the very outgushing of childhood.

Having satisfied myself with a peep or two from below that
I had acted with singular propriety in descending the way I
did, I dipped my foot into the sea, like the other children
—as if the sea were a new thing to a fellow who had grown up
so near it as to be nearly amphibious—and came away weary
and vexed with my own thoughts; for, go whither I would
and do what I would, the disagreeable idea would keep returning
to me, that if I should ever be so happy as to meet
with her whose imperial shadow had haunted me so long,
year after year, by night and by day, and whether I was
awake or asleep, it was quite possible—I could not bear to say
probable—that she might have as bad a mouth, if not altogether
so bad a foot, as the shape that I saw coming up out of the
agitated sea, as I stood leaning over the rail of the pier, just
ready to drop into it.

1 It is told of Cleopatra and believed, that strangers were so transported
by her magnificent carriage, that many sold themselves to death for an
opportunity of being with her a little time.

1 Ryde, or Ride, on the Isle-of-Wight, opposite Portsmouth.

1 A somewhat celebrated hotel at Brighton, where I put up (with more
than ever mortal did before) on my way to Portsmouth.

2 A trap so called on the Isle-of-Wight.