There is a calm which comes upon the heart,
Shedding a sense of holiness around;
Assuaging pain, allaying throe and smart,
And tuning all its chords to tender sound.
It is not hope, nor patience; but the soul,
Exalted, yet resigned, feels one by one
Its passions ebb, and gazing on the goal,
Breathes the unconscious prayer, "Thy will be done!"

IDLE HOURS IN CADIZ.

I sit in my murky London chambers one
of these tawny foggy days when the sky keeps
changing colours, like a great sickly cameleon,
and I turn over the red-edged leaves of my
Spanish note-book to rub up my memory.
I find amongst other notes:

GRANADA, Monday, August—, 1858.—The string
of apish-browed galley-slaves in yellow jackets,
who clink in chains, sprinkle water up and down
the parade on the river-side, trying maliciously to
splash the passers-by.

Let that go.

2. THE MADHOUSE AT CARTHAGENA.—The silent
officer, who had not spoken for three days, and the
moaning woman with the frightened staring eyes
and black dishevelled hair, who had but the night
before murdered her two children.

That won't do.

3. MURILLO'S PICTURE, at the Seville Museo.—
The Saint holding his own heart, red as a
pincushion, and with a sort of Valentine dart stuck
through it.

I shall deal with Murillo another day.

4. THE FIRST GLIMPSE of that great sapphire
mountain of a whale that we sighted off Cape Saint
Vincent, and which sent up a water rocket as a
signal to us, then touched his hat, bowed, and
disappeared. A phenomenon followed by a neck-and-neck
somersault-race of porpoises all round our
vessel, and a huge ugly drift of a shark that we
fired at, spotted with blood, but could not capture.

No. I must look at my Cadiz pages, for
those are what I want just now. Here they
are.

CADIZ.—The perpetual dimpling of the hotel
fountain pool, and the blowing in and out, light
and dark, of that luminous sail in the boat I took to
cross the bay  N. B. The water near the shore, of
the pleasant colour of lemonade with the sun on it.

Ah! now I remember. Yes, it was after
days of stormy vicissitude and Odyssean
coasting of cape and promontory, rock,
monastery, and hill, that a certain bright ten
o'clock of an August morning (almost the
very morning that Columbus in a fishing
smack pushed out of the harbour at Palos)
certain voices on the quarter-deck called
out that they saw land. Somewhere under
the light there was certainly something,
as I said to Parker, who was looking quite
in the wrong direction—indeed, staring
hard at a salmon-coloured and irrelevant
cloud. It was more like a small luminous
fog bank, or a low bar of golden-breathed
vapour than land. Gradually it
grew; and grew faster than the magic bean
plant in the fairy story: grew, grew, from a
shapeless blurred line like so much cancelled
sunshine, to solid gold dross; then this
purified to a finer ore, and, lastly, when we
poured up, like a party of boarders hot from
a tea and toast breakfast, singing snatches
of nautical songs and looking up at the
rigging to appear nautical, we saw the gold
veil filtering off, and a real bullion pyramid
of houses: in fact, A CITY lying at the water's
edge waiting for our arrival. It was Cadiz;
the merchant city, the sister of Havannah,
the city English guns have often vomited fire
at through stormy whirlwinds of crimson and
sulphurous smoke. It is the wine city; the
city at whose capture Elizabeth stamped her
foot and cried, "Marry, well done!" The
yellow glazed domes like tea cups turned over
by a giant to preserve some special specimen
of the bigot or fanatic, is the cathedral. Those
brown square walls are forts. There are the
palm trees. See how they run surging into
the sea like so many sharks' snouts. Those
white walls are government store-houses.
That great yellow building is a barrack or a
hospital. How graciously the city grows and
grows; sending up tower and terrace and
dome cluster after cluster; till we, forgetting
that it is we who are in motion, seem to see
some great procession advancing and widening
toward us.

An artist who had studied at Madrid told
me, as an instance ot the gravity and dignity
of the Castilians, that he once saw in a public
square in that city an itinerant dentist
mounted on a horse, to whom a pain-stricken
muleteer came, griping at his jaw for advice.
The grave quack did not dismount; hardly
stooped in his saddle; but, with one
experienced far-sighted keen glance at the
cavernous tooth, drew a long Toledo rapier
with a curious twisted steel hilt that hung
by his side, slipped the point under the
muleteer's black fang, and scooped it out
with a single twitch. With military
precision he then wiped his sword, slipped it
back into its sheath, held out his hand for
the twopenny fee, touched his sombrero, and
rode gravely off. I certainly never saw
anything quite equal to this deed of surgery;
though I did once see a quack at Florence
stop his chaise in the great Castle Square
and take out a man's tooth in the front seat
of the vehicle, surrounded by an admiring
crowd. I have indeed too seen odd sights
(for instance)—a Spanish beggar on horseback,
and heard a Sicilian mendicant plead
that he was a marchese; but I never saw
anything quite so gallant, gay, and chivalrous as
the agile man in black who sprang up the
vessel's side. As we let the anchor go
with a crashing froth and a chinking run
and jolt of the chain cable, several bright-