Tiverton writes me word that he 'll be back in a few days. He went over to speak on the Jew Bill. He says that his liberal speech on that measure "stood to him" very handsomely in Lombard Street He has forwarded the report of his oration, but I have n't read it. His chief argument in favor of admitting them into Parliament is, "There are so few of them." It's very like the lady's plea,—of the child being a little one. However, I don't think it signifies much one way or t'other; but it seems strange to exclude men from legislation who claim for their ancestor the first Lawgiver.
I shall be all eagerness to hear what success you have had for the scholarship. You are a happy fellow to have heart and energy for an honorable ambition; and that you may have "luck"—for that is requisite, too—is the sincere wish of your attached friend,
James Dodd.
LETTER XXIX. CAROLINE DODD TO MISS COX AT MISS MINCING'S ACADEMY, BLACK ROCK, IRELAND
The Moorg Thal.
My dear Miss Cox,—How happy would you be if only seated in the spot where I now write these lines! I am at an open window, the sill of which is a great rock, all covered with red-brown moss, and beneath, again, at some thirty feet lower, runs the clear stream of the Moorg River. Two gigantic mountains, clad in pine forests to the summits, enclose the valley, the view of which, however, extends to full two miles, showing little peeps of farmhouses and mills along the river's bank, and high upon a great bold crag, the ducal castle of Eberstein. The day is hot but not sultry, for a light summer breeze is playing over the water, and, high up, the clouds move slowly on, now casting broad masses of mellow shadow over the deep-tinted forest.
The stream here falls over some masses of rock with a pleasant gushing music that harmonizes well with the songs of the peasant girls, who are what we should in Ireland call "beetling" their clothes in the water. On the opposite bank some mowers are seated at their dinner, under the shadow of a leafy horsechestnut-tree, and, far away in the distance, a wagon of the newly cut hay is traversing the river; the horses stop to drink, and the merry children are screaming their laughter from the top of the load. I hear them even here.
That you may learn where I am, and how I have come hither, let me tell you that I am on a visit with Mrs. Morris, the mother of Captain M., at a little cottage they have taken for the season, about twelve miles from Baden, in a valley called the Moorg Thal. If its situation be the very perfection of picturesque choice, it contains within quite enough of accommodation for those who occupy it. The furniture, too, most simple though it be, is of that nice old walnut-wood, so bright and mellow-looking; and our little drawing-room is even handsomely ornamented by a richly carved cabinet and a centre-table, the support of which is a grotesque dwarf with four heads. Then we have a piano, a reasonably well-filled book-shelf, and a painter's easel, to which I turn at intervals, as I write, to give a passing touch of light to those trees now waving in the summer's wind, and which I destine, when finished, for my dear, dear governess. All the externals of rural life in Germany are highly picturesque,—I might almost call them poetic. The cottages, the costume, the little phrases in use amongst the people, their devotional offices, and, above all, their music, make up an ideal of country life such as I scarcely conceived possible to exist.
There is, too, I am told,—for my imperfect knowledge of the language does not permit me to state the fact of myself,—an amount of information amongst the people seldom found in a similar class throughout the rest of Europe. I do not mean the peasantry here, but the dwellers in the small villages,—those, for instance, who follow handicrafts and small trades, and who are usually great readers and very acute thinkers. Denied almost entirely all access to that daily literature of newspapers on which our people feed, they fall back upon a very different class of writing, and are conversant with the works of their great prose and verse writers. Their thoughts are thus idealized to a degree; they themselves become assuredly less work-a-day and practical, but their hopes, their aspirations, and their ambitions take a higher flight than we could ever think possible from such humble resting-places. Mrs. Morris, who knew Germany many years ago, tells me that those fatal years of '48 and '49 have done them great injury. Suddenly called upon to act, in events and contingencies of which they derived all their knowledge from some parallels in remote history, they rushed into the excesses of a mediæval period, as the natural consequences of the position; and all the atrocities of bygone centuries were re-enacted by a people who are unquestionably the most docile and law-obeying of the whole Continent. They are now calming down again, and there is every reason to think that, if, unshaken by troubles from without or within, Germany will again be the happy land it used to be.