CHAPTER I.
PAGE
The Average Briton,[1]

CHAPTER II.
Olla Podrida,[14]

CHAPTER III.
Spurgeon and Cummings,[29]

CHAPTER IV.
The Two Elizabeths,[39]

CHAPTER V.
Prince Guy,[52]

CHAPTER VI.
Shakspeare and Irving,[67]

CHAPTER VII.
Kenilworth,[84]

CHAPTER VIII.
Oxford,[96]

CHAPTER IX.
Sky-larks and Stoke-Pogis,[111]

CHAPTER X.
Our English Cousins,[121]

CHAPTER XI.
Over the Channel,[137]

CHAPTER XII.
Versailles—Expiatory Chapel—Père Lachaise, [154]

CHAPTER XIII.
Southward Bound,[170]

CHAPTER XIV.
Pope, King, and Forum,[183]

CHAPTER XV.
On Christmas-Day,[196]

CHAPTER XVI.
L’Allegro and Il Penseroso,[216]

CHAPTER XVII.
With the Skeletons,[230]

CHAPTER XVIII.
“Paul—a Prisoner,”[243]

CHAPTER XIX.
Tasso and Tusculum,[258]

CHAPTER XX.
From Pompeii to Lake Avernus,[272]

CHAPTER XXI.
“A Sorosis Lark,”[293]

CHAPTER XXII.
In Florence and Pisa,[308]

CHAPTER XXIII.
“Beautiful Venice,”[325]

CHAPTER XXIV.
Bologna,[339]

CHAPTER XXV.
“Non é Possibile!”[351]

CHAPTER XXVI.
Lucerne and The Rigi,[366]

CHAPTER XXVII.
Personal and Practical,[379]

CHAPTER XXVIII.
Home-life in Geneva—Ferney,[392]

CHAPTER XXIX.
Calvin—The Diodati House—Primroses,[408]

CHAPTER XXX.
Corinne at Coppet,[419]

CHAPTER XXXI.
Chillon,[428]

LOITERINGS IN PLEASANT PATHS.

CHAPTER I.
The Average Briton.

SUNDAY in London: For the first time since our arrival in the city we saw it under what passes in that latitude and language for sunshine. For ten days we had dwelt beneath a curtain of gray crape resting upon the chimney-tops, leaving the pavements dry to dustiness. “Gray crape” is poetical—rather—and sounds better than the truth, which is, that the drapery, without fold or shading, over-canopying us, was precisely in color like very dirty, unbleached muslin, a tint made fashionable within a year or so, under the name of “Queen Isabella’s linen” (“le linge de la Reine Isabeau”). The fixed cloud depressed and oppressed us singularly. It was a black screen set above the eyes, which we were all the while tempted to push up in order to see more clearly and farther,—a heavy hand upon brain and chest. For the opaqueness, the clinging rimes of the “London fog,” we were prepared. Of the mysterious withholding for days and weeks of clouds threatening every minute to fall, we had never heard. We had bought umbrellas at Sangster’s, as does every sensible tourist immediately after securing rooms at a hotel, and never stirred abroad without them; but the pristine plaits had not been disturbed. Struggle as we might with the notion, we could not rid ourselves of the odd impression that the whole nation had gone into mourning. Pleasure-seeking, on the part of sojourners who respected conventionalities, savored of indecorum. We were more at our ease in the crypt of St. Paul’s, and among the dead of Westminster Abbey, than anywhere else, and felt the conclave of murderers, the blood-flecked faces of the severed heads, the genuine lunette and knife of Samson’s guillotine in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, to be “quite the thing in the circumstances.”

The evil, nameless spell was broken by the clangor of the Sabbath bells. “The gray pavilion rose” and did not fall—for twenty-four hours. Strolling through St. James’s Park in the hour preceding sunsetting, we pointed out to one another the pale blue, dappled with white, of the zenith, the reddening mists of the horizon. The ground was strewed with autumnal leaves, russet and brown. The subdued monotony of the two shades of decay did not move us to adverse criticism. The crimsons, golds, and purples that were robing woods we knew of over the water, would be incongruous in this sober-hued land. In the matter of light and color, he who tarries in England in autumn, winter, and early spring, soon learns to be thankful for small favors. We were grateful and satisfied. We were in a mood to be in love with England,—“our old home;” still walked her soil as in a blessed dream, haunted only by sharp dreads of awakening to the knowledge that the realization of the hopes, and longings, and imaginings of many years was made of such stuff as had been our cloud-pictures. We were in process of an experience we were ashamed to speak of until we learned how common it was with other voyagers, whose planning and pining had resembled ours in kind and degree. None of us was willing to say how much time was given to a comical weighing of the identity question, somewhat after the fashion of poor Nelly on the roadside in the moonlight:—If this were England, who then were we? If these pilgrims were ourselves—veritable and unaltered—could it be true that we were here? If I do not express well what was as vague as tormenting, it is not because the system of spiritual and mental acclimation was not a reality.

The Palace of St. James, a range of brick and dinginess, stretched before us as we returned to the starting-point of the walk around the park, taking in the Bird-cage Walk, where Charles II. built his aviaries and lounged, Nelly Gwynne, or the Duchess of Portsmouth, at his side, a basket of puppies hung over his lace collar and ruffled cravat. It is not a palatial pile—even to eyes undried from the juice of Puck’s “little western flower.”

“It would still be a very decent abode for the horses of royalty—hardly for their grooms,” said Caput, critically. “And it is worth looking at when one remembers how long bloody Mary lay there, hideous, forsaken, half dead, the cancerous memories of Calais and Philip’s desertion consuming her vitals. There lived and died the gallant boy who was the eldest son of James I. If he had succeeded to the throne his brother Charles would have worn his head more comfortably and longer upon his shoulders. That is, unless, as in the case of Henry VIII., the manhood of the Prince of Wales had belied the promise of early youth.”