which is imitated from Dante's
Squilla di lontano
Che paja'l giorno pianger che si musre[343].
*
Oxford.
Peltier had hastened to trumpet my translation in his paper. At sight of Oxford I remembered the same poet's Ode on a distant Prospect of Eton College:
Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade!
Ah, fields beloved in vain!
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
A stranger yet to pain!
I feel the gales that from ye blow,
. . . . . .
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring.
Say, Father Thames,...
. . . . . .
What idle progeny succeed
To chase the rolling circle's speed
Or urge the flying ball?
Alas! regardless of their doom
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond to-day[344].
Who has not experienced the feelings and regrets here expressed with all the sweetness of the muse? Who has not softened at the recollection of the games, the studies, the loves of his early years? But can they be revived? The pleasures of youth reproduced by the memory are ruins seen by torchlight.
*
Separated from the Continent by a long war, the English at the end of the last century preserved their national manners and character. There was still but one people, in whose name the sovereign power was wielded by an aristocratic government; only two great friendly classes existed, bound by a common interest: the patrons and the dependents. That jealous class called the bourgeoisie in France, which is beginning to arise in England, was then not known: nothing came between the rich land-owners and the men occupied with their trades. Everything had not yet become machinery in the manufacturing professions, folly in the privileged classes. Along the same pavements where one now sees dirty faces and men in surtouts, passed little girls in white cloaks, with straw-hats fastened under the chin with a ribbon, a basket on their arm, containing fruit or a book; all kept their eyes lowered, all blushed when one looked at them: