Non-Fiction > Uncollected essays > Volume 30, 1874 - MacMillan's Magazine

Ordered South.
69
passed the indefinable line that separates
South from North. And this is an un-
certain moment ; for sometimes the con-
sciousness is forced upon him early, on
the occasion of some slight association,
a colour, a flower, or a scent ; and some-
times not until, one fine morning, he
wakes up with the southern sunshine
peeping through thepe;vs<V«H('5, and the
southern patois confusedly audible below
the windows. Whether it come early
or late, however, this pleasure will not
end with the anticipation, as do so many
others of the same family. It will leave
h.im wider awake than it found him,
and give a new significance to all he may
see for many days to come. There is
something in the mere name of the
South that carries enthusiasm along with
it. At. the sound of the word, he pricks
up his ears ; he becomes as anxious to
seek out beauties and to get by heart the
permanent lines and character of the
landscape, as if he had been told that
it was all his own — an estate out of
which he bad been kept unjustly, and
which he was now to receive in free and
full possession. Even those who have
never been there before feel as if they
had been ; and everybody goes com-
paring, and seeking for the familiar, and
finding it with such ecstacies of recog-
nition, that one would think they were
conaing home after a weary absence,
instead of travelling hourly farther
abroad.
It is only after he is fairly arrived
and settled down in his chosen corner,
that the invalid begins to understand
the change that has befallen him.
Everything about him is as he had
remembered, or as he had anticipated.
Here, at his feet, under his eyes, are the
olive gardens and the blue sea. jS'othing
can change the eternal magnificence of
form of the naked Alps behind Mentone;
nothing, not even the crude curves of
the railway, can utterly deform the
suavity of contour of one bay after
another along the whole reach of the
Eiviera. And of all this, he has only a
cold head knowledge that is divorced
fi-om enjoyment. He recognizes with
his intelligence that this thing and that
thing is beautiful, while in his heart of
hearts he has to confess that it is not
beautiful for him. It is in vain that he
spurs his discouraged spirit ; in vain
that he chooses out points of view, and
stands there, looking with all his eyes,
and waiting for some return of the
pleasure that he remembers in other
days, as the sick folk may have awaited
the coming of the angel at the pool of
Bethesda. He is like an enthusiast
leading about with him a stolid, in-
diflerent tourist. There is someone
by who is out of sympathy with the
scene, and is not moved up to th&
measure of the occasion ; and that
someone is himself. The world is
disenchanted for him. He seems to
himself to touch things with mufiled
hands, and to see them through a veil.
His life becomes a pal^-ied fumbling
after notes that are silent when he has
found and struck them. He cannot
recognize that this j)blegmatic and un-
impressionable body with which he now
goes burthened, is the same that he knew
heretofore so quick and delicate and
alive.
He is tempted to lay the blame on
the very softness and amenity of the
climate, and to fancy that in the rigours
of the winter at home, these dead
emotions wou.ld revive and flourish. A
longing for the brightness and silence of
fallen snow seizes him at such times.
He is homesick for the hale rough
Aveather; for the tracery of the frost
upon his window-panes at morning,
the reluctant descent of the first flakes,
and the white roofs relieved against
the sombre sky. And yet the stuff of
which these yearnings are made, is of
the flimsiest: if but the thermometer
fall a little below its ordinary ]\Iedi-
terranean level, or a wind come down
from the snow-clad Alps behind, the
spirit of his fancies changes upon the
instant, and many a doleful vignette of
the grim wintry streets at home returns
to him, and begins to haunt his memory.
The hopeless, huddled attitude of
tramps in doorways; the flinching gait
of barefoot children on the icy pave-
ment ; the sheen of the rainy streets