Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

turning a bush of it aside, and observing the singular drought and dustiness prevailing between the brick or mortar and the back of the leaves.

Plate-glass has a beautiful look in windows; but it is too costly to become general. We remember when the late Mrs. Orby Hunter lived in Grosvenor Place, it was quite a treat to pass by her parlour window, which was an arch, full of large panes of plate-glass, with a box of briliant flowers underneath it, and jessamine and other creepers making a bower of the wall. Perhaps the house has the same aspect still; but we thought the female name on the door was particularly suited it, and had a just ostentation.

ful show of nasturtiums,—a plant which it is an elegance itself to have so inuch regard for. There is also something very agreeable in the good-natured kind of intercourse thus kept up between the inmates of a house and those who pass it. The former appeal to one's good opinion in the best manner, by complimenting us with a share of their elegances; and the latter are happy to acknowledge the appeal, for their own sakes as well as that of the flowers. Imagine (what perhaps will one day be the case) whole streets adorned in this manner, right and left; and multitudes proceeding on their tasks through avenues of lilies and geraniums. Why should they not? Nature has given us the means, and they are innocent, animating, and contribute to our piety towards her. We do not half enough avail ourselves of the cheap riches wherewith she adorns the earth. We also get the most trivial mistakes in our head, and think them refinements, and are afraid of being "vulgar!" A few seeds, for instance, and a little trouble, would clothe our houses every summer, as high as we chose, with draperies of green and scarlet; and after admiring the beauty, we might eat the produce. But then this produce is a bean; and because beans are found at poor tables, we despise them! Nobody despises a vine in front of a house; for vines are polite, and the grapes seldom good enough to be of any use. Well; use, we grant, is not the only thing, but surely we have no right to think ourselves unbigoted to it, when it teaches us to despise beauty. In Italy, where the drink is not common, people have a great respect for beer, and would perhaps rather see a drapery of hops at the front of a house, than vineleaves. Hops are like vines; yet who thinks of adorning his house with them in England? | tempted to enter upon them here. The winNo: they remind us of the ale-house instead of nature and her beauties; and therefore they are "vulgar." But is it not we who are vulgar, in thinking of the ale-house, when nature and her beauties are the greater idea?

[ocr errors]

It is objected to vegetation against walls and windows, that it harbours insects; and good housewives declare they shall be overrun." If this be the fact, care should be taken against the consequences; and should the care prove unavailing, everything must be sacrificed to cleanliness. But is the charge well-founded? and if well-founded in respect to some sorts of vegetation, is it equally so with all? we mean, with regard to the inability to keep out the insects. There is a prejudice against ivy on houses, on the score of its harbouring wet, and making the houses damp; yet this opinion has been discovered to be so groundless that the very contrary is the fact. Ivy is found to be a remedy for damp walls. It wards off the rain, and secures to them a remarkable state of dryness; as any one may see for himself by

Painted glass is still finer; but we have never seen it used in the front windows of a house except in narrow strips, or over doorways; which is a pity, for its loveliness is extreme. A good portion of the upper part of a window or windows might be allotted to it with great effect, in houses where there is light to spare; and it might be turned to elegant and otherwise useful account, by means of devices, and even regular pictures. A beautiful art, little known, might thus be restored. But we must have a separate article on painted windows; which are a kind of passion of ours. They make us loath to speak of them, without stopping, and receiving on our admiring eyes the beauty of their blessing. For such is the feeling they always give us. They seem, beyond any other inanimate object, except the finest pictures by the great masters (which can hardly be called such), to unite something celestial, with the most gorgeous charm of the senses. There are more reasons than one for this feeling; but we must not be

dow must have us to itself, as in the rich quiet of a cathedral aisle.

We will conclude this outside consideration of windows (for we must have another and longer one for the inside), by dropping from a very heavenly to a very earthly picture, though it be one still suspended in the air. It is that of the gallant footman in one of Steele's comedies, making love to the maid-servant, while they are both occupied in cleaning the windows of their master's house. He does not make love as his honest-hearted brother Dodsley would have done (who from a footman became a man of letters); still less in the style of his illustrious brother Rousseau (for he too was once a footman); though there is one passage in the incident, which the ultra-sensitive lackey of the "Confessions" (who afterwards shook the earth with the very strength of his weakness) would have turned to fine sentimental account. The language also is a little too good even for a fine gentleman's gentleman ; but the "exquisite" airs the fellow gives himself, are not so much beyond the reach of brisk foot

man-imitation, as not to have an essence of truth in them, pleasantly showing the natural likeness between fops of all conditions; and they are as happily responded to by those of the lady. The combination of the unsophisticate picture at the close of the extract, with the languishing comment made upon it, is extremely ludicrous.

Enter Tos, meeting PHILLIS.

Tom. Well, Phillis !-What! with a face as if you had never seen me before?-What a work have I to do now! She has seen some new visitant at their house whose airs she has catched, and is resolved to practise them upon me. Numberless are the changes she'll dance through before she'll answer this plain question, videlicit, Have you delivered my master's letter to your lady? Nay, I know her too well to ask an account of it in an ordinary way; I'll be in my airs as well as she. (Aside.) Well, madam, as unhappy as you are at present pleased to make me, I would not in the general be any other than what I am; I would not be a bit wiser, a bit richer, a bit taller, a bit shorter, than I am at this instant. (Looking steadfastly at her.)

Phil. Did ever anybody doubt, Master Thomas, that you were extremely satisfied with your sweet self?

Tom. I am indeed. The thing I have least reason to be satisfied with is my fortune, and I am glad of my poverty; perhaps, if I were rich, I should overlook the finest woman in the world, that wants nothing but riches to be thought so.

Phil. How prettily was that said! But I'll have a great deal more before I say one word. (Aside.)

Tom. I should perhaps have been stupidly above her had I not been her equal, and by not being her equal never had an opportunity of being her slave. I am my master's servant from hire,-I am my mistress's servant from choice, would she but approve my passion.

Phil. I think it is the first time I ever heard you speak of it with any sense of anguish, if you really suffer any.

Tom. Ah, Phillis! can you doubt after what you have seen?

Phil. I know not what I have seen, nor what I have heard; but since I am at leisure, you may tell me when you fell in love with me, how you fell in love with me, and what you have suffered, or are ready to suffer, for

me.

Tom. Oh! the unmerciful jade! when I am in haste about my master's letter:-But I must go through it (aside). Ah! Too well I remember when, and on what occasion, and how I was first surprised. It was on the First of April one thousand seven hundred and fifteen I came into Mr. Sealand's service; I was then

a little hobble-de-hoy, and you a little tight girl, a favourite handmaid of the house-keeper. At that time we neither one of us knew what was in us. I remember I was ordered to get out of the window, one pair of stairs, to rub the sashes clean-the person employed on the inner side was your charming self, whom I had never seen before.

Phil. I think I remember the silly accident. What made you, you oaf, ready to fall down into the street?

Tom. You know not, I warrant you; you could not guess what surprised me you took no delight when you immediately grew wanton in your conquest, and put your lips close and breathed upon the glass, and when my lips approached, a dirty cloth you rubbed against my face, and hid your beauteous form; when I again drew near, you spit and rubbed, and smiled at my undoing.

VI.-WINDOWS, CONSIDERED FROM

INSIDE.

THE other day a butterfly came into our room and began beating himself against the upper panes of a window half open, thinking to get back. It is a nice point-relieving your butterfly-he is a creature so delicate. If you handle him without ceremony, you bring away on your fingers, something which you take to be down, but which is plumes of feathers; and as there are no fairies at hand, two atoms high, to make pens of the quills, and write "articles" on the invisible, there would be a loss. Mr. Bentham's ghost would visit us, shaking his venerable locks at such unnecessary-pain-producing and reasonable-pleasurepreventing heedlessness. Then if you brush him downwards, you stand a chance of hurting his antennæ, or feelers, and of not knowing what mischief you may do to his eyes, or his sense of touch, or his instruments of dialogue; for some philosophers hold that insects talk with their feelers, as dumb people do with their fingers. However, some suffering must be hazarded in order to prevent worse, even to the least and most delicate of heaven's creatures, who would not know pleasure if they did not know pain; and perhaps the merrier and happier they are in general, the greater the lumps of pain they can bear. Besides, all must have their share, or how would the burden of the great blockish necessity be equally distributed and finally, what business had little Papilio to come into a place unfit for him, and get bothering himself with glass? Oh, faith! -your butterfly must learn experience, as well as your Buonaparte.

There was he, beating, fluttering, flouncing, wondering that he could not get through so clear a matter (for so glass appears to be to insects, as well as to men), and tearing his

silken little soul out with ineffectual energy. What plumage he must have left upon the pane! What feathers and colours, strewed about, as if some fine lady had gone mad against a ball-room door, for not being let in! But we had a higher simile for him than that. "Truly," thought we," little friend, thou art like some of the great German transcendentalists, who in thinking to reach at heaven by an impossible way (such at least it seemeth at present) run the hazard of cracking their brains, and spoiling their wings for ever; whereas, if thou and they would but stoop a little lower, and begin with earth first, there, before thee, lieth open heaven as well as earth; and thou mayest mount high as thou wilt, after thy own happy fashion, thinking less and enjoying all things.'

And hereupon we contrived to get him downwards, and forth, out into the air, sprang he,-first against the lime-trees, and then over them into the blue ether, as if he had resolved to put our advice into practice.

We have before spoken of the fret and fury into which the common fly seems to put himself against a window. Bees appear to take it more patiently, out of a greater knowledge; and slip about with a strange air of hopelessness. They seem to "give it up." These things, as Mr. Pepys said of the humanities at court, "it is pretty to observe." Glass itself is a phenomenon that might alone serve a reflecting observer with meditation for a whole morning, so substantial and yet so air-like, so close and compact to keep away the cold, yet so transparent and facile to let in light, the gentlest of all things, so palpably something, and yet to the eye and the perceptions a kind of nothing! It seems absolutely to deceive insects in this respect, which is remarkable, considering how closely they handle it, and what microscopic eyes we suppose them to have. We should doubt (as we used to do) whether we did not mistake their ideas on the subject, if we had not so often seen their repeated dashings of themselves against the panes, their stoppings (as if to take breath), and then their recommencement of the same violence. It is difficult to suppose that they do this for mere pleasure, for it looks as if they must hurt themselves. Observe in particular the tremendous thumps given himself by that great hulking fellow of a fly, that Ajax of the Diptera, the blue-bottle. Yet in autumn, in their old age, flies congregate in windows as elsewhere, and will take the matter so quietly as sometimes to stand still for hours together. We suppose they love the warmth, or the light; and that either they have found out the secret as to the rest, or

"Years have brought the philosophic mind." Why should Fly plague himself any longer with household matters which he cannot alter?

|

He has tried hard in his time; and now he resigns himself like a wise insect, and will taste whatsoever tranquil pleasures remain for him, without beating his brains or losing his temper any longer. In natural livers, pleasure survives pain. Even the artificial, who keep up their troubles so long by pride, self-will, and the want of stimulants, contrive to get more pleasure than is supposed out of pain itself, especially by means of thinking themselves illused, and of grumbling. If the heart (for want of better training) does not much keep up its action with them, the spleen does; and so there is action of some sort: and whenever there is action, there is life; and life is found to have something valuable in it for its own sake, apart from ordinary considerations either of pain or pleasure. But your fly and your philosopher are for pleasure too, to the last, if it be harmless. Give old Musca a grain of sugar, and see how he will put down his proboscis to it, and dot, and pound, and suck it in, and be as happy as an old West India gentleman pondering on his sugar cane and extracting a pleasure out of some dulcet recollection.

Gamblers, for want of a sensation, have been known to start up from their wine, and lay a bet upon two rain drops coming down a pane of glass. How poor are those gentry, even when they win, compared with observers whose resources need never fail them! To the latter, if they please, the rain-drop itself is a world, a world of beauty and mystery and aboriginal idea, bringing before them a thousand images of proportion, and reflection, and the elements, and light, and colour, and roundness, and delicacy, and fluency, and beneficence, and the refreshed flowers, and the growing corn, and dewdrops on the bushes, and the tears that fall from gentle eyes, and the ocean, and the rainbow, and the origin of all things. In water, we behold one of the old primeval mysteries of which the world was made. Thus, the commonest rain-drop on a pane of glass becomes a visitor from the solitudes of time.

A window, to those who have read a little in Nature's school, thus becomes a book, or a picture, on which her genius may be studied, handicraft though the canvas be, and little as the glazier may have thought of it. Not that we are to predicate ignorance of your glazier nowa-days, any more than of other classes that compose the various readers of penny and three-half-penny philosophy, cheap visitor, like the sunbeams, of houses of all sorts. The glazier could probably give many a richer nian information respecting his glass, and his diamond, and his putty, (no anti-climax in these analytical days,) and let him into a secret or two, besides, respecting the amusement to be derived from it. (We have just got up from our work to inform ourselves of the nature and properties of the said mystery, putty; and

should blush for the confession, if the blush would not imply that a similar ignorance were less common with us than it is.)

But a window is a frame for other pictures besides its own; sometimes for moving ones, as in the instance of a cloud going along, or a bird, or a flash of lightning; sometimes for the distant landscape, sometimes the nearer one, or the trees that are close to it, with their lights and shades; often for the passing multitude. A picture, a harmony, is observable, even in the drapery of the curtains that invest it; much more in the sunny vine-leaves or roses that may be visible on the borders, or that are trailed against it, and which render many a poor casement so pleasant. The other day, in a very humble cottage window in the suburbs, we saw that beautiful plant, the nasturtium, trained over it on several strings; which must have furnished the inmates with a screen as they sate at their work or at their tea inside, and at the same time permitted them to see through into the road, thus constituting a far better blind than is to be found in many great houses. Sights like these give a favourable impression of the dispositions and habits of the people within,-show how superior they are to their sophistications, if rich, and how possessed of natural refinement, if among the poorer classes. Oh! the human mind is a fine graceful thing everywhere, if the music of nature does but seize its attention, and throw it into its natural attitude. But so little has the "schoolmaster" yet got hold of this point, or made way with it, and so occupied are men with digging gold out of the ground, and neglecting the other treasures which they toss about in profusion during the operation (as if the clay were better than the flowers which it produced), that few make the most of the means and appliances for enjoyment that lie round about them, even in their very walls and rooms. Look at the windows down a street, and generally speaking they are all barren. The inmates might see through roses and geraniums, if they would; but they do not think of it, or not with loving knowledge enough to take the trouble. Those who have the advantage of living in the country or the suburbs, are led in many instances to do better, though their necessity for agreeable sights is not so great. But the presence of nature tempts them to imitate her. There are few windows anywhere which might not be used to better advantage than they are, if we have a little money, or can procure even a few seeds. We have read an art of blowing the fire. There is an art even in the shutting and opening of windows. People might close them more against dull objects, and open them more to pleasant ones, and to the air. For a few pence, they might have beautiful colours and odours, and a pleasing task, emulous of the showers of April, beneficent as May; for they

who cultivate flowers in their windows (as we have hinted before) are led instinctively to cultivate them for others as well as themselves; nay, in one respect they do it more so; for you may observe, that wherever there is this "fenestral horticulture," (as Evelyn would have called your window-gardening,) the flowers are turned with their faces towards the street.

But there is an art in the shutting and opening of windows."—Yes, for the sake of air (which ought to be had night as well as day, in reasonable measure, and with precautions), and for the sake of excluding, or admitting, what is to be seen out of doors. Suppose, for example, a house is partly opposite some pleasant, and partly some unpleasant, object; the one, a tree or garden; the other, a ginshop or a squalid lane. The sight of the first should be admitted as constantly as possible, and with open window. That of the other, if you are rich enough, can be shut out with a painted blind, that shall substitute a beautiful landscape for the nuisance; or a blind of another sort will serve the purpose; or if even a blind cannot be afforded, the shutters may be partly closed. Shutters should always be divided in two, horizontally as well as otherwise, for purposes of this kind. It is sometimes pleasant to close the lower portion, if only to preserve a greater sense of quiet and seclusion, and to read or write the more to yourself; light from above having both a softer and stronger effect, than when admitted from all quarters. We have seen shutters, by judicious management in this way, in the house of a poor man who had a taste for nature, contribute to the comfort and even elegance of a room in a surprising manner, and (by the opening of the lower portions and the closure of the upper) at once shut out all the sun that was not wanted, and convert a row of stunted trees into an appearance of interminable foliage, as thick as if it had been in a forest.

"But the fact was otherwise;" cries some fastidious personage, more nice than wise; "you knew there was no forest, and therefore could not have been deceived."

"Well, my dear Sir, but deception is not necessary to every one's pleasure; and fact, is not merely what you take it for. The fact of there being no forest might have been the only fact with yourself, and so have prevented the enjoyment; but to a livelier fancy, there would have been the fact of the imagination of the forest (for everything is a fact which does anything for us)*, and there would also * Facio, factum (Latin)—to do, done. What is done in imagination, makes a greater or less impression according to the power to receive it; but it is unquestionably done, if it impresses us at all; and thus becomes, after its kind, a fact. A stupid fellow, utterly without imagination, requires tickling to make him laugh; a livelier one laughs at a comedy, or at the bare apprehension of a thing laughable. In both instances there is a real impression though

have been the fact of having cultivated the imagination, and the fact of our willingness to be pleased, and the fact of the books we have read, and above all, the fact of the positive satisfaction. If a man be pleased, it is in vain you tell him he has no cause to be pleased. The cause is proved by the consequence. Whether the cause be rightly or wrongly cultivated, is another matter. The good of it is assumed in the present instance; and it would take more facts than are in the possession of a "mere matter-of-fact man" to disprove it. Matter of fact and spirit of fact must both be appreciated, in order to do justice to the riches of nature. We are made of mind as well as body,-of imagination as well as senses. The same mysterious faculty which sees what is before the eyes, sees also what is suggested to the memory. Matter of fact is only the more palpable world, around which a thousand spirits of fact are playing, like angels in a picture. Not to see both, is to be a poor unattended creature, who walks about in the world conscious of nothing but himself, or at best of what the horse-jockey and the coachmaker has done for him. If his banker fails, he is ruined! Not so those who, in addition to the resources of their industry, have stock in all the banks of nature and art, (pardon us this pun for the sake of what grows on it,) and whose consolations cannot wholly fail them, as long as they have a flower to look upon, and a blood not entirely vitiated.

A window high up in a building, and commanding a fine prospect, is a sort of looking out of the air, and gives a sense of power, and of superiority to earth. The higher also you go, the healthier. We speak of such windows as Milton fancied, when he wished that his lamp should be seen at midnight in "some high lonely tower;" a passage, justly admired for the good-nature as well as loftiness of the wish, thus desiring that wayfarers should be the better for his studies, and enjoy the evidence of their fellow-creature's vigils. But elevations of this kind are not readily to be had. As to health, we believe that a very little lift above the ground-floor, and so on as you ascend, grows healthier in proportion. Malaria (bad air) in the countries where a plague of that kind is prevalent, is understood to be confined to a certain distance from the earth; and we really believe, that even in the healthiest quarters, where no positive harm is done by nearness to it, the air is better as the houses ascend, and a seat in a window becomes valuable in proportion. By-and-by, perhaps, studies and other favourite sitting-rooms will be built accordingly; and more retrospective reverence be shown to the "garrets" that used to be so from very different causes, one from " matter of fact," (if you please,) the other from spirit of fact; but in either case the thing is done, the fact takes place. The moving cause exists somehow, or how could we be moved?

famous in the annals of authorship. The poor poet in Pope, who lay

High in Drury lane,

Lull'd by soft zephyrs through the broken pane,

was better off there, than if he had occupied the ground-floor. For our parts, in order that we may save the dignity of our three-halfpenny meditations, and at the same time give evidence of practising what we preach, we shall finish by stating, that we have written this article in a floor neither high enough to be so poetical nor low enough for too earthly a prose,-in a little study made healthy by an open window, and partly screened from overlookers by a bit of the shutter, while our lookout presents us with a world of green leaves, and a red cottage top, a gothic tower of a church in the distance, and a glorious appletree close at hand, laden with its yellow | balls.

"Studded with apples, a beautiful show." Some kindness of this sort Fortune has never failed to preserve to us, as if in return for the love we bear to her rolling globe; and now that the sincerity of our good-will has become known, none seem inclined to grudge it us, or to dispute the account to which we may turn it, for others as well as ourselves.

We had something more to say of seats in windows, and a good deal of windows at inns, and of sitting and looking out of windows; but we have other articles to write this week, of more length than usual, and must reserve it for a future number.

VII-A FLOWER FOR YOUR WINDOW.

NAMES OF FLOWERS. MYSTERY OF THEIR BEAUTY.

In the window beside which we are writing this article, there is a geranium shining with its scarlet tops in the sun, the red of it being the more red for a back-ground of lime-trees which are at the same time breathing and panting like airy plenitudes of joy, and developing their shifting depths of light and shade of russet brown and sunny inward gold.

It seems to say "Paint me!" So here it is.

Every now and then some anxious fly comes near it we hear the sound of a bee, though we see none; and upon looking closer at the flowers, we observe that some of the petals are transparent with the light, while others are left in shade; the leaves are equally adorned after their opaquer fashion, with those effects of the sky, showing their dark-brown rims; and on one of them a red petal has fallen, where it lies on the brighter half of the shallow green cup, making its own red redder, and the green greener. We perceive, in imagination, the

« ZurückWeiter »