Prose Idylls

. Between the two points races are changed, climates are changed, scenery is changed, the very plants under your feet are changed, from a Western to an Eastern type. You pass

ts very legends, reminds you of Devon and

centre of creation. In plain English and fact, whether you agree with his theory or not, you pass from the region of respectable whales, herrings, and salmo

an fishes slip out of the Straits of Gibraltar, and up the coast of Portugal, and, onc

iterranean; for Fluellen mistook when he said that there were salmons in Macedon, as well as Monmouth; the louvine is none other than the nasty bass, or sea-perch of the Atlantic; the shad (extinct in these islands, save in the Severn) is a

h man has ceased to hunt, because he fancies that he has killed them all, they seem inclined to reappear. For in 1854 one was washed ashore near St. Jean

ry, Bayonne, Biarritz, Guettary, and St. Jean de Luz, sent forth their hardy whale-fishers, who slew a

lantic; and now their descendants are content to stay at home and take t

oward Bayonne, each with her basket on her head, as she laughed and sang, and tossed her black hair, and flashed her brown eyes, full of life and the enjoyment of life. Pretty enough

erly French. Moorish blood there may be, too, here and there, left behind by those who built the little 'atalaya' or fire-beacon, over the old harbour, to correspond, by its smoke column, with a long line of similar beacons down the Spanish coast. The Basques resemble in look the Southern Welsh-quick-eyed, neat in feature, neat in dress, often, both men and women, beautiful. The men wear a flat Scotch cap of some bright colour, and call it 'berretta.' The women tie a gaudy handkerchief round their heads, and compel one corner to stand forward from behind the ear in a triangle, in proportion to the size and stiffness whereof the lady seems to think herself well dressed. But the pretty Basque handkerchief will soon give place to the Parisian bonn

s and caves and natural bridges-and watch tumbling into the sea, before the Biscayan surges, the trim walks and summer-houses, which were erected by the municipality in honour of the Empress and her suite. Yearly they tumble in, an

, purple, crimson, pink, ash-grey. They are all prickly sea-eggs (presumably the Echinus lividus, which is found in similar places in the west of Ireland), each buried for life in a cup-shaped hole which he has excavated in the rock, and shut in by an overhanging lip of living lime-seemingly

ered by soft dappled cloud, for ever sliding from the Atlantic and the Asturias mountains, in a climate soft as milk, and e

eam of the Nive, draining the western Pyrenees. And beyond, to the south-east, in early spring, the Pyrenean snows gleam bright, white clouds above the clouds. As one turns southward, the mountains break down into brown heather-hills, like Scottish grouse moors. The two nearest, and seemingly highest, are the famous Rhune and Bayonette, where lie, to this day, amid the heath and crags, hundreds of

which lies the fatal citadel of St. Sebastian; all backed up by the fantastic mountains of Spain; the four-horned "Quatre Couronnes," the pyramidal Jaysquivel, and beyond them again, sloping headlong into the sea, peak after peak, each one more blue and tender than the one before, leading the eye on and on for seemingly countless leag

s. Poverty (though there is none of what we call poverty in Britain) fills the little walled court before its cottage with bay trees and standard figs; while wealth (though there is nothing here of what we call wealth in Britain) asserts itself uniformly by great standard magnolias, and rich trailing roses, in full bloom here in April instead of-as with us-in July. Both on bank and in bog grow Scorzoneras (dandelions with sword-shaped leaves) of which there are none in these isles; and every common is ablaze with strange and lovely flowers. Each dry spot is brilliant with the azure flowers of a prostrate Lithospermum, so exquisite a plant, that it is a marvel why we do not see it, as 'spring-bedding,' in every British garden. The heath is almost hidden, in places, by the large white flowers and trailing stems of the sage-leaved Cistus. Delicate purple Ixias, and yet more delicate Hoop-petticoat Narcissus, spring from the turf. And here a

k with the blood of gallant invaders, and of no less ga

rf beneat

hero's se

Europe arose to bring home the Bourbons, as did the Lake Regillus of ol

Negresse,' but is now a gay railway station. Where that station is, was another tarn, now drained. The road ran betwee

, rushed out again in the early morn, and poured a torrent of living men down this ro

e thrust from it, the English army would have been cut in two-one half driven back upon

and retaken many times. You house above it, embowered in trees, is the 'Mayor's house,' in which Sir John Hope was so nearly captured by the French. Som

nsular War,' and in Mr. Gleig's 'Subaltern.' They are not t

h seeing of all, the lovely ladies of Bayonne, who swarm out when the sun goes down, for air and military music. You may try to find (in which you will probably fail) the arms of England in the roof of the ugly old cathedral; you may wander the bridges over which join the three quarters of the city (for the Adour and the Nive meet within the walls), and probably lose your way-a slight matter among folk who, if you will but take off your hat, call them Monsieur, apologize for the trouble you are giving, begin the l

ched Sir John Hope's famous bridge; and as you leave Bayonne by rail, you run beneath the English cemetery, where lie the

orious for the French and their great captain-wearied with long marches, disheartened by the apathy of their own c

ayonne, we are in the P

coparia, which grows full six feet high, and furnishes from its roots those 'bruyère' pipes, which British shopkeepers have rechristened 'briar-roots.' Instead, again, of the Scotch firs of Ascot, the pines are all pinasters (miscalled P. maritima). Each has the same bent stem, carrying at top, long, ragged, scanty, leaf-tufts, instead of the straight stem and dense short foliage of the sturdier Scotchman; and down each stem runs a long, fresh scar, and at the bottom (in spring at least), hangs a lip of tin, and a neat earthen pipkin, into which distils turpentine as clear as glass. The trees have mostly been planted within the last fifty years, to keep the drifting sands from being blown away. As timber they are about

s.' The late Emperor helped forward, it is said, new pine plantations, and sundry schemes for reclaiming the waste. Arcachon, on a pine-fringed lagoon of the Atlantic, has great artificial ponds for oyster breeding, and is rising into a gay watering-place, with a distinguished scientific society. Nay, more: it saw a few ye

t may be easily divined, by the h

nd thunder, frost and snow, in the process of scooping out the deep valleys of the Pyrenees? Out of that one crack, which men call the Val d'Ossau, stone has been swept enough to form a considerable island. Where is it all? In these Landes. Carried down year by year to the Atlantic, it has been driven back again, year by year, by the fierce gales of the Bay of Biscay, and rolled up int

unning north for Bordeaux and the land of clarets, turn so

tever be its advantages, gives no capital or power of combined action for draining wet lands; and the valleys of Gascony and Bearn in the south, as well as great sheets of

crags, which make one long to try in them the virtues of 'Jock Scott,' 'the Butcher,' or the 'Dusty Miller.' And perhaps not without

of Soult's before the superior forces of Wellington, t

ench could not blow up, as they did every other bridge on their retreat; and the ruins of that robber den to which Gaston Ph?bus, Count of Foix (of whom you may read in Froissart), used to drag his v

is now covered with vineyards. Everywhere the fatal slopes are rich wit

ernadotte, King of Sweden; where, in the charming old chateau, restored by Louis Philippe, those who list may see the t

ed-miraculous coincidence-to be in Pau, in the collection of a naturalist, another shell, of the same shape and size. Swiftly and deftly pious hands substituted it for the real relic

colony, and boasts of one, and sometimes two, packs of English foxhounds. But this I may be allowed to say. That of all delectable spots I have yet seen, Pau is the most delect

rking, the next cawing, and the next (probably the little green Hylas, who has come down out of the trees to breed) quacking in treble like a tiny drake. The bark (I suspect) is that of the gorgeous edible frog; and so suspect

between aspen-fringed islets, grey with the melting snows; and beyond her again rise br

t the clear blue sky, stands out the whole snow-range of the Pyrenees; and in the midst, exactly opposit

p-scene; the mountains are so utterly unlike any natural object in the north, that for the moment one fancies them painted and not real; the

es for the first time in his life the eternal snows of which he has read since childhood

h markets), are filled with all our English birds of passage, finding their way northwards from Morocco and Algiers; and with our English nightingales, black-caps, willow-wrens, and whitethroats, are other songsters which never find their way to these isles, for which you must consult the pages of Mr. Gould or Mr. Bree-and chief among them the dark Orpheus,

cellent road (all public roads in the south of France are excellent, and equal to our best English roads) ove

ose forests which were once sacred to the seigneurs and their field sports. The seigneurs are gone now, and the game with them; and the forests are almost gone-so ruinate, indeed, by the peasantry, that the Government (I believe) has interfered to stop a destruction of timber, which involves the destruction both of fire-wood and of the annual fall of rain. But the trees which remain, whether in forest or in homestead, are sadly mangl

very kind, and in the midst the pleasant old city, with its once famous University. Of Tarbes, you may read in the pages of Froissart-or, if you prefer

rested of old, in a 'right pleasant inn;' you may eat of the delicious cookery which is to be found, even in remote towns, throughout the south of France, and even-if you dare-of 'Coquilles aux Champignons.' You may sit out after dinner in that delicious climate, listening to the rush of the cle

m dips, the s

ide comes

nd asking and giving of cigar-lights between men of every class-and a little quiet modest love-making on the outskirts of the crowd, which is very pleasant to behold. And when the music is silent, and the people go off suddenly, silently, and soberly withal (for there are no drunkards in these parts), to their early beds, you stand and look up into the 'purple night,' as Homer calls it-that sout

say, with the wise American, 'It

ummer months is gay, here and there, like Aldershott, with the tents of an army at play. But in spring the desolation is utter, and the loneliest grouse-moo

he land slopes, or seems to slope, down from you to the mountain range, and all their roots are lost in a dim sea of purple haze. But shut out the snow line above, and you will find that the seeming haze is none, but r

the blue sky, a row of them as far as eye can see. But, ever and anon, as afternoon draws on, one of those little clouds, seeming tired of waiting at its post ever since sunrise, loses its temper, boils, swells, settles down on its own private peak, and explodes in a fierce thunderstorm down its own private valley, without discomposing in the least its neighbour cloud-cushions right and left. Faintly the

fly over that great wall of homeless rock and snow. On the other side there must needs be another folk, with another tongue, other manners, other polities, and if not another creed, yet surely with other, and utterly different, conceptions of the universe, and of ma

ees, run down the rich ugly vale of the Garonne, through crops of exceeding richness-wheat, which is reaped in July, to be followed by buckwheat rea

speak. Volumes have been written on its antiquities, and volumes on its history;

passing over the chilly dreary uplands of Lannemezan. Now you find yourself at once in Languedoc. You have passed from the Atlantic region into the Mediterranean; from the old highlands o

green of the mulberry orchards; and beyond them again, southward to the now distant snows of the Pyrenees, and northward to the orange downs and purple glens of the Cevennes, all blazing in the blazing sun. Green, grey, orange,

enth century. For, since then, the delver and sower-for centuries the slave of the Roman, and, for centuries after, the slave of Teutonic or Saracenic conquerors-has become his own master, and his

the more desolate in the pruning time of early spring, when half the boughs of the evergreen are cut out, leaving the trees stripped as by a tempest, and are carried home for fire-wood in the quaint little carts, with their solid creaking wheels, drawn by dove-coloured kine. Very ancient are some of these olives, or rather, olive-groups. For when the tree grows old, it splits, and falls asunder, as do often our poll

mer comes, but are now black knobbed and gnarled clubs, without a sign of life save here and

cred and miraculous fruit, the special gift of God; not merely the pruning out of the unfruitful branches, to be burned as fire-wood, or-after the old Roman fashion, which I believe endures still in these parts-buried as manure at the foot of the parent stem; not merely these, but the seeming death of the vine, shorn of a

the dead Christ, who yet should rise and be alive for evermore-enters into, it m

ng as they would yield, and then letting the land relapse, for twenty years, into miserable pasture. This process (which lingered thirty years ago in remote parts of Devon), and nothing better, seems to have been that change of cultivated lands which Tacitus ascribes to the ancient Germans. Rotation of crops, in any true sense, came to us from Provence and Languedoc; and with it, subsoiling; irrigation; all our artificial grasses, with lucerne at the head of th

ilk. In summer they reap their crops, and hang the maize-heads from their rafters for their own winter food, while they sell the wheat to the poor creatures, objects of their pity, who live in towns, and are forced to eat white bread. From spring to autumn they have fruit, and to spare, for themselves and for their customers; and with the autumn comes the vintage, and all its classic revelries. A happy folk-under a happ

to burst forth again at sunrise. Parched are all lips and eyes; for the air is full of dust, yea, even of gravel which cuts like hail. Aching are all right-sides; for the sudden chill brings on all manner of liver complaints and indigestions. All who can a

olumns of warm light air, whose place has to be supplied by colder and heavier air from inland; whether the north-west mistral is, or is not, a diverted north-easter; an arctic current which, in its right road toward the tropics across the centre of France, has been called to the eastwar

of Roman and of Saracen blood. As "Aquitanians," "Proven?aux,"-Roman Provincials, as they proudly called themselves, speaking the Langue d'Oc, and looking down on the northerners who spoke the Langue d'Oil as barbarians, they were in those days guilty of the capital crime of being foreigners; and as foreigners they were exterminated. What their religious tenets were, we shall never know. With the Vaudois, Waldenses, "poor men of Lyons," they must not be for a moment confounded. Their creed remains to us only in the calumnies of their enemies. The confessions in the archives of the Tolosan Inquisition, as elicited either under torture or fear of torture, deserve no

louse), and slew him then and there. They were shut up in the town, and withstood heroically a long and miserable siege. At last they were starved out. The conquerors offered them their lives-so say the French stories-if they would recant. But they would not. They were thrust togethe

or souls, whatever were their sins or their confusions

indignation. The crimes of the Terreur Blanche, at the Restoration-though ugly things were done in the south, especially in Nismes-were far less horrible again; though they were, for the most part, acts of direct personal retaliation on the republicans of 1793. And since then the French heart has softened fast. The irritating sense of hereditary wrong has passed away. The Frenchman conceives that justice is done to him, according to his o

rance of the middle age and the France of the present day, is fitly typified by the difference between the new Carcassone

table burghers; industry and peace. We pass outside to the great basin of the Canal de Languedoc, and get more avenues of stately trees, and among them the red marble statue of Riquet, whose genius planned and carried out the mighty canal which joins the ocean to the sea; the wonder of its day, which proved the French to be, at least in the eighteenth century, the master-engineers of the world; the only people who still inherited the mechanical skill and daring of their Rom

c Dame Carcas, who defended the town single-handed against Charlemagne, till this tower fell down by miracle, and let in the Christian host. But do not believe that she gave to the place its name of Carcassone; for the first syllable of the word is hint enough that it was, long ere her days, a Celtic caer, or hill-fortress. Pause at the inner gate; you need not exactly believe that when the English Crusader, Simon de Montfort, burst it open, and behold, the town within was empty and desolate, he cried: 'Did I not tell you that those heretics were devils; and behold, being devils, they have vanished into air.' You must believe, I fear, that of the great multitude who had been crowded, starving, and fever-stricken within, he found four hundred poor wretches who had lingered behind, and burnt them all alive. You need not believe that that is the mouth of the underground passage which runs all the way from the distant hills, through which the Vicomte de Beziers, after telling Simon de Montfort and the Abbot of Citeaux that he would sooner be flayed alive than betray the poor folk who had taken refuge with him, got them all safe away, men, women, and

ook, with eyes and hearts refreshed by the change, at a curious Visigothic tower, in which the good bishop Sidonius A

the Middle Ages were like, le

iven. Stay not therein an hour, lest you take fever, or worse: but come out of the gate over the drawbridge, and stroll down the canal. Look back a moment, though, across the ditch. The whole face of the wall is a museum of Roman gods, tombs, inscriptions, bas-reliefs: th

d Africa. And in the hedges are great bay-trees; and inside them, orchards of standard fig and white mulberry, with its long yearling shoots of glorious green-soon to be stripped bare for the silkworms; and here and there long lines of cypresses, black against the bright green plain and bright blue sky. No; you are not in Britain. Certainly not; for there is a drake (not a duck) quacking with feeble treble in that cypress, six fe

se Narbonnois is shameless and shocking; and 'immondices' of every kind lie festering in the rain

said, lie heaped together the remains of thousands of men, women, and children, slaughtered around their own altars, on that fatal day, whe

e small skiffs lying under the dark tower of Agde, another place of blood, fitly built of black lava blocks, the offspring of the nether pit. T

es since our childhood; and there, close to the rail, beyond the sand-hills, delicate wavelets are breaking for ever on a yellow beach,

Roman than Rome herself,' to which we owe the greater part of our own progress; the sea, too, Algeria and Carthage, and Cyrene, and fair lands now desolate, surely not to be desolate for ever;-the sea of civilization. Not only to the Christian, nor to the classic scholar, but to every man to whom the progress of his race from barb

one of Claude, or Vernet, or Stanfield. No mountain-ranges far aloft, no cliffs toppling into the water, with convents and bastides perched on their crags; and seaports, with their land-locked harbours, and quaint l

, visible for miles: but all around is the great sheet of blue glassy water: while the air is as glassy clear as the water, and through it, at seemingly immense distances, the land shows purple and orange, blue and grey, till the landscape is one great rainbow. White ships slide

banks, haunted by the pelican and the flamingo, and waders from the African shore; a region half land, half water, where dwell sa

e il Rhoda

that he who next travels that way may have as glorious weather, an