Here let me dream on crisping lavender,
And fragrant elder-fronds, palm-branched and
dank
And flowered rushes, by the river bank,
While not a bee along the fields doth stir.

Float up, soft cloud, dim fringed with cooling rain
Under the thirsting uplands. Forest wind,
Leave all thy cavern darknesses behind,
And touch, with golden ripples, the dry grain.

Or, moving past the brown skirts of the hay,
Catch, in thy damp palms, the sweet burial breath
Of clover-bells and thyme-blooms shorn to death,
And brome-grass bleaching in the mower's way.

I know by the shrill sheep-bells, from the height,
The sun is wasting. Many and many a day
Have I gathered down those pastures grey,
But none with such a tender farewell light

Now, let the brown sail seek the chesnut cove,
Let the black rook hie westward to the wood,
And let the heron fly the sheltered wood;
With me remains the plenitude of love.

Yea, as the sunset strikes the mountain scars,
Foldling the vales in vapour, and the farms
Gather the long herds to their smoking arms,
With me remains the plenitude of love.

And I am filled with quiet; field and fen,
And breathing plant and creature, but unite
My being, in a higher sense and light,
With that vast world that lies beyond our ken.

NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOURS TO THE
GORILLA.

IF the reader wishes to get entirely out of
the beaten track of travel; if he is sick of inns,
passports, guide-books, and bills; if he has any
taste for fever and ague; for coming home with
his spleen swelled to six times its natural size,
and his liver like a piece of cork; if he wants
to know what it is to be blistered by the sun till
covered with blotches from head to foot;
if he is in search of the untutored savage in all
his native lustre; if he is interested in red huge
spiders, scorpions, armies of ants, deadly
serpents, gorillas, gigantic cockroaches, leopards
and alligators; if he loves journeying through
reeking mangrove swamps and over shaky
bridges, or in frail canoes amid swarms of
sharks; if he does not object to having clothes
and flesh torn to strips with thorns and aloe-
jungle, with the occasional chance of being
drowned in several different ways, and starved in
one very probable way; of falling into elephant
traps, and being caught fast in tough vines; of
being soaked in cold rains, and turned out of his
house by tornadoes; and otherwise generally
stung, tost, scorched, gored, &c., let him seek
some strong sensations in the shape of African
travel.

Every person has had the misfortune to
encounter the man who sets up for a cynic, who
thinks it clever to put a bad construction upon
every word and deed; to represent society as
hopelessly corrupt; commerce on the brink of
irretrievable ruin; the country drifting into
war; laws getting into a dead-lock; prestige
abroad gone to Hades, and any other person
except himself as either a fool for not seeing
this, or a knave for profiting by it. A gentleman
of this disposition would enjoy himself to
his entire satisfaction in the GORILLA COUNTRY,
and the best thing he can do is to go there, and
—to stay there.

He can have a prince to wash for him, and
can teach the women to cook and wash, as better
men have had to do; he can enjoy the awful
spectacle of murderous feuds, and the excitement
of a life where, as in the desert, every
man's hand is against his brother; he can shiver
through cold nights and weeks of rain beneath
the equator; have his spirits raised by the sharp
yell of the leopard and the cheerful roar of the
gorilla; be poisoned by his cook with the arsenic
he intended for stuffing his birds and beasts ; he
might even, if lucky, find the cloven-footed
people, and hear the scream of their mighty
eagle; and if dozy he might, amid the thousands
of bleaching skeletons in the burying-grounds
of the barracoons, muse over the sad destiny of
man, aud think how he must resemble Count
Volney meditating on the fall of Euripides amid
the ruins of some Egyptian temple.

Of course his first visit on reaching West
Africa will be to the natives, whom he will find,
with a few exceptions, liars, cheats, and
drunkards; rather dirty, too, but none the less
picturesque for that. By far the greater part of
them are murderers, and many are cowards
also. Except the Fans, who labour under
the disadvantage of being cannibals, they have
not the slightest idea of fighting out their
bloody feuds with anything like honour. To
slaughter a hapless woman going about her daily
work; to hack a poor child or feeble old man to
pieces; to shoot through a window, like certain
savages of the Sister Isle, are the deeds of the
hero, and a gentleman who distinguishes himself
in this way, instead of being hanged, covers
himself with glory, and, if it be the custom of his
tribe, files his teeth. Murder is now, as in the
days of Hannibal, Pharaoh, Mahomet, and
Bruce, an inborn mad lust of the African blood.
Southern advocates of the "Divine Institution"
may think that many of these heroes would
be almost as well occupied in planting rice and
sugar-cane in the States, as in hacking each
other's heads off. The question bids fair to
be solved in a very practical way, as they not
only war with each other on the most trifling
pretext, till villages are depopulated and the
greater part of both tribes either killed or
starving, but they now and then get up little
private massacres among themselves.

They lie beyond all calculation. Far from
lying or slandering being looked upon as
disgraceful, they are considered accomplishments.
When a fellow has made up his mind to swear
to anything, only a native can get at the truth.
However, where advertising traders and quack
will-forgers are allowed to tell such infamous
and mischievous falsehoods as they are in
England, we should not be too hard upon the "noble
savage." Their ideas of wit require the same
Christian-like indulgence, but the reader has
doubtless often enjoyed the spectacle of seeing