it is quite thirty years since I read Paul and Virginia-praises the little fool's modesty. Well said Swift that a nice man is a man of nasty ideas.

Hazlitt's farther account of his journey is meagre; but we can follow him in imagination, swinging gaily along the roads, with happy expectation of sojourn with a poet at the end of his travel. He passed through Gloucester; stopped perchance at Mr. Phillpotts' excellent inn; may have seen the late Bishop of Exeter (last hope of the Church, my orthodox journals tell me) playing marbles with some other little schoolboy of Gloucester, also in his first decade. The wayfarer was eager to reach his bourne, for he found himself two days before his time, and passed them in the unhappy little town of Bridgwater (properly Burgh Walter), since famous for having tempted a great historian to authorise bribery.

Somerset is not a picturesque county until you get upon Exmoor; but Nether Stowey is one of its pleasantest villages. A few miles away Wordsworth was staying at Alfoxton House, and the two poets were doing some of the most important work they ever did. Coleridge was writing the Ancient Mariner, and Wordsworth Peter Bell. The latter poet had in those days a touch of humour, grim and grotesque, somewhat in Callot's manner. Why, O why did his friends. advise him to expunge from Peter Bell that immortal stanza, superior to almost anything in Dante, which described

'a party in a parlour,

Crammed as they in life were crammed,

Some sipping punch, some sipping tea,
But, as you could plainly see,

All silent, and all damned'?

Although Hunter's Combe and the Seven Wells are valleys worthy of Devon, yet Coleridge carried his young friend away across the border into his own county. There the coast grows wilder, and the air brighter and more stimulant, and the Channel sea of a purer blue. After a long day's march, their feet keeping time to the rhythm of Coleridge's talk,-they reached Lynton at midnight. But even at midnight the hospitality of Devon was not wanting; and they got an excellent supply of bacon and eggs. What they drank therewith is not noted: I hope it was sound Devonshire cider. A still cider of Devon, liqueured and bottled, would beat Clicquot and Roederer out of the field. Hazlitt saw the Valley of Rocks, and apparently did not think much of it. In fact, his recollections are seldom of the true poetic form. He remembers the excellent tea and toast, eggs and honey, which he got for breakfast at the Lynton inn; and these are excellent things to remember. But you would think the Valley of Rocks- a scene which looks as if the very skeleton of the world were at that point revealed-would have struck the slowest imagination. However, Hazlitt was born to be a critic,

and we must therefore forgive him. The critic is the eunuch of literature.

I pass from the country of Coleridge's youth to that country whereof he was the poetic conqueror. He revealed Lakeland to the modern world. It was not unknown to the ancients: maidens of the mere were the darlings of old romance; and when I dwelt by Eden, I learnt of a surety that it was the very river which Arthur's father had vainly attempted to turn from its course.

'Let Uther Pendragon do what he can,

Eden shall run where Eden ran.'

Although Wordsworth and Southey both dwelt amid the Lakes, and the former did much to make that region his own, it is with Coleridge, above all poets, that we connect their beauty. Certainly Professor Wilson celebrated Windermere in wondrous periods of perfect yet perishable prose; but the Professor, though he loved the Lakes with an infinite love, was not quite a poet. All that he has

written of his beloved vicinage does not equal Coleridge's:

'In Langdale Pike and Witch's Lair,
And Dungeon Ghyll, so foully rent
With ropes of rock and bells of air,
Three sinful sextons' ghosts are pent;
Who all give back, one after t'other,
The death-note to their living brother.
And oft too, by the knell offended,

Just as their one! two! three! is ended,
The devil mocks the doleful tale

With a merry peal from Borrowdale.'

It was in the year 1848 that I first made acquaintance with Coleridge's country. Fourteen years had the great poet been dead. But I met Wordsworth-Virgilium tantum ridi. Henry Crabb Robinson was with him at the time. Less than two years had passed when the great poet died; and the recollection of those brief hours in his presence will never pass from me so long as my memory endures. I remember the sacred splendour, the lambent light of his eyes beneath overhanging brows; I remember the boyish delight wherewith, in his sixteenth lustrum, the old poet welcomed a boyish admirer; I remember his showing me his favourite views, his favourite laurel-trees, all planted from slips taken by his own hand from those which Petrarch set around Virgil's tomb; I remember how sorrowful he seemed at the thought that after his death Rydal Mount might be occupied by those who would not recognise the name of Wordsworth. Lighter things I remember. Among them, that I myself should have some difficulty in obtaining poetic repute, seeing that my name had been made illustrious by the author of certain odes which are among the most beautiful in the language. Also the great poet's critical judgments on Southey and Macaulay. Southey, he thought, had written one tolerable poem, that on th

holly-tree; and even in that there was a blemish in the very first line. Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome should have been called Lays of Modern Athens; they were utterly untrue, both in character and costume; they were Scotch, not Roman.

Ah, full well do I love Coleridge's country, the region of the Lakes! Nowhere in the world, I think, is such perfection of beauty enclosed within such narrow limits. Marvellous are its varieties. The right way to enter it in the old coaching days was to cross the sands of Morecambe Bay at low water, and take a conveyance from Ulverstone to Newby Bridge, whence a gay little lake steamer would take you up Windermere. But now there is a railway across those sands; and the traveller no longer sees the moving groups of pilgrims walking briskly over the almost level space which the sea will soon reclaim, and obliged to wade where some river or stream makes a channel in the roadway. Where the Kent and the Leven made their way over the sands the buxom peasant-girls were wont to wade, highkilted, and innocently unconscious. All that the railway has destroyed, no doubt. The journey had in those days the piquancy of peril; for the incoming tide rushes up those slightly sloping sands faster than a horse can gallop, and many a luckless traveller has been caught by the wave; but now you are only too safe. Mr. Bright says a man is safer in a first-class railway carriage than anywhere else in the world-safer than in the House of Commons, or even at church. So some of the temptations to take the Ulverstone route to Windermere have passed away.

Between

'Winding Winandermere, the river-lake,'

and the Red Tarn on Helvellyn, how wide the difference! The sinuous stream, twelve miles long, alive from south to north with yachts and steamers, with many beautiful islands resting on its waters, with superb mansions on its marge, and a ferry crossing it just before you reach Bowness, is in strange contrast with the lonely Red Tarn, more than 2000 feet high on the giant shoulder of Helvellyn, mysterious beneath a sombre precipice: and between the two extremes there are infinite gradations. I cannot go through the gamut of meres. Sometimes the memory of wild and stormy Wastwater haunts me; sometimes a thought of placid Grasmere, round which I have walked, listening to Wordsworth's pregnant converse, in days ere I deigned to write mere prose. Ah, that was a magical time!—but I was unconscious of its delight. Wordsworth sleeps in the shadow of Grasmere church; and I no longer can sing, as I sang in happy youth:

'Dream, dream, heart of my own love!

Sweet is the breath of the odorous South;
Sweet is the island we sail to alone, love;
Sweet is a kiss of thy ruddy young mouth.'

The most beautiful village in the world, to my thinking, is Trout

beck, on the east, above Windermere. Its quaint old cottages, in their yew-shaded courtyards, are without parallel elsewhere. Still the beck flows down to Windermere; still, I hope, it is alive with trout. But does the inn of the Mortal Man still offer hospitality to the wayfarer mutton-ham and oatmeal-cake and home-brewed ale ? Many a time did Coleridge, I feel certain, take his ease at that inn. The lines which were written on its signboard (I hope time has not effaced them) might have come from the humorous pen that produced the Devil's Walk:

'O mortal man, who livest by bread,
Why is thy nose so very red?

O silly wight, with cheeks so pale,
It comes by drinking Troutbeck ale.'

People seldom visit Lakeland in winter; but they should, to see Helvellyn and Skiddaw shrouded by snow, to see the waterfalls, swollen to torrents, struggling against the frost which solidifies the mist of their pools, and snatches from the descending stream icicles like colossal stalactites. That battle between the falling force and the restraining frost is worth travel to see; and the fantastic forms into which the water is tortured as it grows into crystals are quite beyond imagination or description.

After all, Dreamland, and not Lakeland, was Coleridge's true country. Well did he deserve those additional stanzas which Wordsworth wrote concerning him in the margin of the Castle of Indolence: 'A noticeable man with large gray eyes, And a pale face that seemed undoubtedly As if a blooming face it ought to be; Heavy his low-hung lip did oft appear Deprest by weight of musing Phantasy;

Profound his forehead was, though not severe.'

In that somnolent realm, delightfully pictured by Thomson, that land of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye,' Coleridge has a place of his own. Whoever has followed Christabel into the moonlit woodland, or the ancient mariner across the solitary sea where he killed the albatross, or has seen that stately pleasure-dome which Kubla Khan decreed in Xanadu,

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran,
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea,'

will recognise in Coleridge the most divine of dreamers. Yes, though I have traced him in terrene regions, which he has royally made his own, yet do I repeat what I said, that Dreamland was Coleridge's country.

MORTIMER COLLINS.

SCIENTIFIC BALLOONING

By 'scientific ballooning' I do not mean the application of so-called scientific and mechanical notions to the management, the propulsion, or the guidance of aërial machines; that is a humiliating subjectone of grand intentions and ludicrous realisations. My title refers to the use of balloons for the ostensible purpose of advancing science, by carrying barometer and thermometer readers up into the higher airs, to ascertain how their instruments behave there, in the hope of furthering our small acquaintance with the constitution and commotions, the eddies and upper currents, of the atmospheric ocean at the bottom of which we dwell.

Ever since Montgolfiers took the air philosophy has been subject to spasmodic fits of sky-soaring. The habit of regarding every fresh thing as new has led many to suppose that balloon meteoroscopy is a novelty pertaining exclusively to the present decade; but it is no such thing. The earliest ascent of any unfabulous aërial machine dates from the year 1783; and in a score of years, as soon as travelling became safer and the balloon ceased in some measure to be the sole right of showmen, ascents were made for scientific purposes alone. To rest the palm upon the proper crown, the honour of inaugurating this branch of research must be accorded to the Academy of St. Petersburg. There was a sort of toy experiment made in 1784, it is true, by Boulton, Watt's partner, but it is not worth calling scientific; it merely consisted in letting up a balloon with a slow-match attached to it, so as to explode the gas at a great elevation; the idea being to try if anything like thunder would be reproduced by reverberation of the explosion. Nothing came of it, however; the people shouted so lustily that no cloud-born sound was heard at all.

During the first years of this century we find the savans lamenting that such a potent instrument as the balloon should have been abandoned to the use of those who pandered to the amusement of frivolous sightseers. It was a pity, the grounds of which must be removed, or science would be the loser by its apathy. So that ancient Academy of Sciences aforesaid voted the means for an ascent uniquely devoted to scientific progress. The programme was simple: the points aimed at were, to ascertain the physical conditions of the atmosphere; in fuller words, its pressure, temperature, dampness, and constituent proportions at different elevations. Most important was the determination of the law of decrease of density or