and oft have we visited it; but while yet we pursue the ends of this our mortal being, in the mystery of the brain whence ideas arise, and in the mystery of the heart whence emotions flow—kindred and congenial all—thought ever blending with feeling, reason with imagination, and conscience with passion—'tis our duty to draw our delight from intercommunion with the spirit of our kind. Weakest or wickedest of mortals are your soul-sick, life-loathing, world-wearied men. In solitude we are prone to be swallowed up in selfishness; and out of selfishness what sins and crimes may not grow! At the best, moral stagnation ensues—and the spirit becomes, like "a green-mantled pool," the abode of reptiles. Then ever welcome to us be living faces, and living voices, the light and the music of reality—dearer far than any mere ideas or emotions hanging or floating aloof by themselves in the atmosphere of imagination. Blest be the cordial grasp of the hand of friendship—blest the tender embrace of the arms of love! Nay, smile not, fair reader, at an old man's fervour; for Love is a gracious spirit, who deserteth not declining age.
The Drosky is at the door—and, my eye! what a figure is Peter! There he sits, like a bear, with the ribbons in his paws—no part visible of his human face or form divine, but his small red eyes—and his ruby nose, whose re-grown enormity laughs at Liston. One little month ago, the knife of that skilful chirurgeon pared it down to the dimensions of a Christian proboscis. Again 'tis like a wart on a frost-reddened Swedish turnip. Pretty Poll, with small delicate pale features, sits beside him like a snowdrop. How shaggy since he returned from our last Highland tour is Filho da Puta! His mane long as his tail—and the hair on his ears like that on his fetlocks. He absolutely reminds us of Hogg's Bonassus. Ay, bless these patent steps—on the same principle as those by which we ascend our nightly couch—we are self-deposited in our Drosky. Oh! the lazy luxury of an air-seat! We seem to be sitting on nothing but a voluptuous warmth, restorative as a bath. And then what furry softness envelopes our feet! Yes—Mrs Gentle—Mrs Gentle—thy Cashmere shawl, twined round our bust, feels almost as silken-smooth as thine own, and scented is it with the balm of thy own lips. Boreas blows on it tenderly as a zephyr—and the wintry sunshine seems summery as it plays on the celestial colours. Thy pelisse, too, over our old happy shoulders, purple as the neck of the dove when careering round his mate. Thy comforter, too, in our bosom—till the dear, delightful, delicious, wicked worsted thrills through skin and flesh to our very heart. It dirls. Drive away, Peter. Farewell Lodge—and welcome, in a jiffy, Moray Place.
And now, doucely and decently sitting in our Drosky, behold us driven by Peter, proud as Punch to tool along the staring streets the great-grandson of the Desert-born! Yet—yet—couldst thou lead the field, Filho, with old Kit Castor on thy spine. But though our day be not quite gone by, we think we see the stealing shades of eve, and, a little further on in the solemn vista, the darkness of night; and therefore, like wise children of nature, not unproud of the past, not ungrateful for the present, and unfearful of the future, thus do we now skim along the road of life, broad and smooth to our heart's content, able to pay the turnpikes, and willing, when we shall have reached the end of our journey, to lie down, in hope, at the goal.
What pretty, little, low lines of garden-fronted cottages! leading us along out of rural into suburban cheerfulness, across the Bridge, and past the Oriental-looking Oil-Gas Works, with a sweep winding into the full view of Pitt Street (what a glorious name!) steep as some straight cliff-glen, and an approach truly majestic—yea, call it at once magnificent—right up to the great city's heart. "There goes Old Christopher North!" the bright boys in the playground of the New Academy exclaim. God bless you, you little rascals!—We could almost find it in our heart to ask the Rector for a holiday. But, under him, all your days are holidays—for when the precious hours of study are enlightened by a classic spirit, how naturally do they melt into those of play!
"Gay hope is yours, by fancy fed,
Less pleasing when possest;
The tear forgot as soon as shed,
The sunshine of the breast;
Yours buxom health, of rosy hue,
Wild wit, invention ever new,
And lively cheer, of vigour born;
The thoughtless day, the easy night,
The spirits pure, the slumbers light,
That fly th' approach of morn."
Descending from our Drosky, we find No. 99 Moray Place, exhibiting throughout all its calm interior the self-same expression it wore the day we left it for the Lodge, eight months ago. There is our venerable winter Hat—as like Ourselves, it is said, as he can stare—sitting on the Circular in the Entrance-hall. Everything has been tenderly dusted as if by hands that touched with a Sabbath feeling; and though the furniture cannot be said to be new, yet while it is in all sobered, it is in nothing faded. You are at first unaware of its richness on account of its simplicity—its grace is felt gradually to grow out of its comfort—and that which you thought but ease lightens into elegance, while there is but one image in nature which can adequately express its repose—that of a hill-sheltered field by sunset, under a fresh-fallen vest of virgin snow. For then snow blushes with a faint crimson—nay, sometimes when Sol is extraordinarily splendid, not faint, but with a gorgeousness of colouring that fears not to face in rivalry the western clouds.
Let no man have two houses with one set of furniture. Home's deepest delight is undisturbance. Some people think no articles fixtures—not even grates. But sofas and ottomans, and chairs and footstools, and screens—and above all, beds—all are fixtures in the dwelling of a wise man, cognoscitive and sensitive of the blessings of this life. Each has its own place assigned to it by the taste, tact, and feeling of the master of the mansion, where order and elegance minister to comfort, and comfort is but a homely word for happiness. In various moods we vary their arrangement—nor is even the easiest of all Easy-chairs secure for life against being gently pushed on his wheels from chimney-nook to window-corner, when the sunshine may have extinguished the fire, and the blue sky tempts the Paterfamilias, or him who is but an uncle, to lie back with half-shut eyes, and gaze upon the cheerful purity, even like a shepherd on the hill. But these little occasional disarrangements serve but to preserve the spirit of permanent arrangement, without which the very virtue of domesticity dies. What sacrilege, therefore, against the Lares and Penates, to turn a whole house topsy-turvy, from garret to cellar, regularly as May-flowers deck the zone of the year! Why, a Turkey or a Persian, or even a Wilton or a Kidderminster carpet, is as much the garb of the wooden floor inside, as the grass is of the earthen floor outside of your house. Would you lift and lay down the greensward? But without further illustration—be assured the cases are kindred—and so, too, with sofas and shrubs, tent-beds and trees. Independently, however, of these analogies, not fanciful, but lying deep in the nature of things, the inside of one's tabernacle, in town and country, ought ever to be sacred from all radical revolutionary movements, and to lie for ever in a waking dream of graceful repose. All our affections towards lifeless things become tenderer and deeper in the continuous and unbroken flow of domestic habit. The eye gets lovingly familiarised with each object occupying its own peculiar and appropriate place, and feels in a moment when the most insignificant is missing or removed. We say not a word about children, for fortunately, since we are yet unmarried, we have none; but even they, if brought up Christians, are no dissenters from this creed, and however rackety in the nursery, in an orderly-kept parlour or drawing-room how like so many pretty little white mice do they glide cannily along the floor! Let no such horror, then, as a flitting ever befall us or our friends! O mercy! only look at a long huge train of waggons, heaped up to the windows of the first floors, moving along the dust-driving or mire-choked streets with furniture from a gutted town-house towards one standing in the rural shades with an empty stomach! All is dimmed or destroyed—chairs crushed on the table-land, and four-posted beds lying helplessly with their astonished feet up to heaven—a sight that might make the angels weep!
People have wondered why we, an old barren bachelor, should live in such a large house. It is a palace; but never was there a greater mistake than to seek the solution in our pride. Silence can be had but in a large house. And silence is the chief condition of home happiness. We could now hear a leaf fall—a leaf of the finest wire-wove. Peter and Betty, Polly and the rest, inhabit the second sunk story—and it is delightful to know that they may be kicking up the most infernal disturbance at this blessed moment, and tearing out each other's hair in handfuls, without the faintest whisper of the uproar reaching us in our altitude above the drawing-room flat. On New-Year's Day morning there is regularly a competition of bagpipers in the kitchen, and we could fondly imagine 'tis an Eolian Harp. In his pantry Peter practised for years on the shrill clarion, and for years on the echoing horn; yet had he thrown up both instruments in despair of perfection ere we so much as knew that he had commenced his musical studies. In the sunk story, immediately below that, having been for a season consumptive, we kept a Jenny ass and her daughter—and though we believe it was not unheard around Moray and Ainslie Places, and even in Charlotte Square, we cannot charge our memory with an audit of their bray. In the sunk story immediately below that again, that distinguished officer on half-pay, Captain Campbell of the Highlanders—when on a visit to us for a year or two—though we seldom saw him—got up a Sma' still—and though a more harmless creature could not be, there he used to sit for hours together, with the worm that never dies. On one occasion, it having been supposed by Peter that the Captain had gone to the East Neuk of Fife, weeks elapsed, we remember, ere he was found sitting dead, just as if he had been alive, in his usual attitude in his arm-chair, commanding a view of the precipice of the back court.
Just as quiet are the Attics. They, too, are furnished; for the feeling of there being one unfurnished room, however small, in the largest house, disturbs the entire state of mind of such an occupant, and when cherished and dwelt on, which it must not unfrequently be, inspires a cold air of desolation throughout the domicile, till "thoughts of flitting rise." There is no lumber-room. The room containing Blue-Beard's murdered wives might in idea be entered without distraction by a bold mind.—But oh! the lumber-room, into which, on an early walk through the house of a friend on whom we had been sorning, all unprepared did we once set our foot! From the moment—and it was but for a moment, and about six o'clock—far away in the country—that appalling vision met our eyes—till we found ourselves, about another six o'clock, in Moray Place, we have no memory of the flight of time. Part of the journey—or voyage—we suspect, was performed in a steamer. The noise of knocking, and puffing, and splashing seems to be in our inner ears; but after all it may have been a sail-boat, possibly a yacht!—In the Attics an Aviary open to the sky. And to us below, the many voices, softened into one sometimes in the pauses of severer thought, are sometimes very affecting, so serenely sweet it seems, as the laverock's in our youth at the gates of heaven.
At our door stand the Guardian Genii, Sleep and Silence. We had an ear to them in the building of our house, and planned it after a long summer day's perusal of the "Castle of Indolence." O Jemmy Thomson! Jemmy Thomson!—O that thou and we had been rowers in the same boat on the silent river! Rowers, indeed! Short the spells and far between that we should have taken—the one would not have turned round the other, but when the oar chanced to drop out of his listless hand—and the canoe would have been allowed to drift with the stream, unobservant we of our backward course, and wondering and then ceasing to wonder at the slow-receding beauty of the hanging banks of grove—the cloud-mountains, immovable as those of earth, and in spirit one world.