It glares upon me from the walls of the Royal Academy, (except when
MACLISE subdues it to his genius,) it fills my soul with terror at
the British Institution, it lures young artists on to their
destruction. Go where I will, the Ghost of Art, eternally working
the passions in hair, and expressing everything by beard, pursues
me. The prediction is accomplished, and the victim has no rest.
OUT OF TOWN
SITTING, on a bright September morning, among my books and papers
at my open window on the cliff overhanging the sea-beach, I have
the sky and ocean framed before me like a beautiful picture. A
beautiful picture, but with such movement in it, such changes of
light upon the sails of ships and wake of steamboats, such dazzling
gleams of silver far out at sea, such fresh touches on the crisp
wave-tops as they break and roll towards me – a picture with such
music in the billowy rush upon the shingle, the blowing of morning
wind through the corn-sheaves where the farmers’ waggons are busy,
the singing of the larks, and the distant voices of children at
play – such charms of sight and sound as all the Galleries on earth
can but poorly suggest.
So dreamy is the murmur of the sea below my window, that I may have
been here, for anything I know, one hundred years. Not that I have
grown old, for, daily on the neighbouring downs and grassy hillsides,
I find that I can still in reason walk any distance, jump
over anything, and climb up anywhere; but, that the sound of the
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ocean seems to have become so customary to my musings, and other
realities seem so to have gone aboard ship and floated away over
the horizon, that, for aught I will undertake to the contrary, I am
the enchanted son of the King my father, shut up in a tower on the
sea-shore, for protection against an old she-goblin who insisted on
being my godmother, and who foresaw at the font – wonderful
creature! – that I should get into a scrape before I was twentyone.
I remember to have been in a City (my Royal parent’s
dominions, I suppose), and apparently not long ago either, that was
in the dreariest condition. The principal inhabitants had all been
changed into old newspapers, and in that form were preserving their
window-blinds from dust, and wrapping all their smaller household
gods in curl-papers. I walked through gloomy streets where every
house was shut up and newspapered, and where my solitary footsteps
echoed on the deserted pavements. In the public rides there were
no carriages, no horses, no animated existence, but a few sleepy
policemen, and a few adventurous boys taking advantage of the
devastation to swarm up the lamp-posts. In the Westward streets
there was no traffic; in the Westward shops, no business. The
water-patterns which the ‘Prentices had trickled out on the
pavements early in the morning, remained uneffaced by human feet.
At the corners of mews, Cochin-China fowls stalked gaunt and
savage; nobody being left in the deserted city (as it appeared to
me), to feed them. Public Houses, where splendid footmen swinging
their legs over gorgeous hammer-cloths beside wigged coachmen were
wont to regale, were silent, and the unused pewter pots shone, too
bright for business, on the shelves. I beheld a Punch’s Show
leaning against a wall near Park Lane, as if it had fainted. It
was deserted, and there were none to heed its desolation. In
Belgrave Square I met the last man – an ostler – sitting on a post
in a ragged red waistcoat, eating straw, and mildewing away.
If I recollect the name of the little town, on whose shore this sea
is murmuring – but I am not just now, as I have premised, to be
relied upon for anything – it is Pavilionstone. Within a quarter
of a century, it was a little fishing town, and they do say, that
the time was, when it was a little smuggling town. I have heard
that it was rather famous in the hollands and brandy way, and that