susceptibilities may not be wounded by a sight of
the burden he is to endure; a pretty conceit
vilely transposed into English in a story about a
cab-horse whose eyes were bandaged by his
driver, lest he should be ashamed of the shabbiness
of the fare who paid but sixpence for under
a mile's drive. I was never south of the Isthmus,
and never saw a llama, save in connexion with
an overcoat in a cheap tailor's show-card; but I
am given to understand that what I have
related is strictly true.

If the lower animals, then, be subject to
nostalgia, and if they be as easily killed by moral as
by physical ailments, why should humanity be
made of sterner stuff? After all, there may be
such things as broken hearts. With regard to
home-sickness, however, I hold that, as a rule,
that malady is caused less by absence from home
than by the deprivations of the comforts and
enjoyments which home affords. Scotchmen and
Irishmen are to be found all over the world, and
get on pretty well wherever they are; but a Scot
without porridge to sup, or an Irishman without
buttermilk to drink at breakfast, is always more
or less miserable. The Englishman, accustomed
to command, to compel, and to trample difficulties
under his feet, carries his home-divinities with
him, and has no sooner set up his tent in Kedar
than he establishes one supplementary booth for
making up prescriptions in accordance with
the ritual of the London Pharmacopœia, another
for the sale of pickles, pale ale, and green tea,
and a third for the circulation of tracts intended
to convert the foreigners among whom he is to
abide. He suffers less, perhaps, from home-
sickness than any other wanderer on the face of
the earth; for he sternly refuses to look upon
his absence from his own country as anything
but a temporary exile; he demands incessant
postal communication with home, or he will fill
the English newspapers with the most vehement
complaints; he will often—through these same
newspapers—carry on controversies, political or
religious, with adversaries ten thousand miles
away; and after an absence from England of
twenty years he will suddenly turn up at a
railway meeting, or in the chair at a public
dinner; bully the board; move the previous
question; or, in proposing the toast of the
evening, quote the statistics of the Cow-cross
Infirmary for Calves, as though he had never
been out of Middlesex. In short, he no more
actually expatriates himself than does an attaché
to an English embassy abroad, who packs up
Pall-Mall in his portmanteau, parts his hair
down the middle, and carries a slender umbrella
—never under any circumstances unfurled—in
the streets of Teheran.

But are you aware that there is another form
of nostalgia which afflicts only Europeans, and,
so far as I know, is felt only in one part of the
world? Its symptoms have not hitherto been
described, and I may christen it Form-sickness.
I should wish to have Mr. Ruskin, Mr. Stirling,
and Mr. Beresford Hope, on the medical board
to whom I submitted my views on this disease;
for it is one architecturally and æsthetically
occult. This Form-sickness begins to attack
you after you have resided some time—say a
couple of months—in the United States of
America. Its attacks are more keenly felt in
the North than in the South; for in the last-
named parts of the Union there are fig and
orange trees, and wild jungles and cane brake—
some of the elements of Form, in fact. It is
the monotony of form, and its deficiencies in
certain conditions: that is to say, curvature,
irregularity, and light and shade, that make you
sick in the North. I believe that half the
discomfort and the uneasiness which most
educated Englishmen experience from a
protracted residence in the States, springs from the
outrage offered to their eye in the shape of
perpetual flat surfaces, straight perspectives,
and violent contrasts of colour. There are no
middle tints in an American landscape. In
winter, it is white and blue; in spring, blue and
green; in summer, blue and brown; in autumn,
all the colours of the rainbow, but without a
single neutral tint. The magnificent October
hues of the foliage on the Hudson and in
Vermont simply dazzle and confound you. You
would give the world for an instant of repose—
for a grey tower, a broken wall, a morsel of
dun thatch. The immensity of the views is
too much for a single spectator. Don't you
remember how Banvard's gigantic panorama of the
Mississippi used to make us first wonder and then
yawn? Banvard is everywhere in the States;
and so enormous is the scale of the scenery in
this colossal theatre, that the sparse dramatis
personæ are all but invisible. An English
landscape painter would scarcely dream of producing
a picture, even of cabinet size, without a group
of peasants, or children, or a cow or two,
or a horse, or at least a flock of geese, in some
part of the work. You shall hardly look half a
dozen times out of the window of a carriage of
an express train in England, without seeing
something that is alive. In America, the
desolation of Emptiness pervades even the longest
settled and the most thickly populated States.
How should it be otherwise? How should
you wonder at it when, as in a score of
instances, not more people than inhabit Hertfordshire
are scattered over a territory as large as
France? One of the first things that struck me
when I saw the admirable works of the American
landscape painters—of such men as Church
and Kensett, Bierstadt and Cropley, and Hart
—was the absence of animal life from their
scenes. They seemed to have been making
sketches of the earth before the birth of
Adam.

This vacuous vastness is one of the provocatives
of Form-sickness. To the European, and
especially to the Englishman, a country without
plenty of people, pigs, poultry, haystacks, barns,
and cottages, is as intolerable as the stage of
the grand opera would be if it remained a
whole evening with a sumptuously set scene
displayed, but not a single actor. New England
is the state in which, perhaps, the accessories of
life are most closely concentrated; but even in