nd
then resettle to their hushed pursuits as if nothing had happened!
Nothing had happened! while in thy heart, perhaps, the whole world
seems to have shot from its axis, all the elements to be at war! And
you sit down, crushed by that quiet happiness which you can share no
more, and smile mechanically, and look into the fire; and, ten to one,
you say nothing till the time comes for bed, and you take up your
candle, and creep miserably to your lonely room.

This is not the eloquence of Borrow, though the thought might have been
his; it may not be in that grand style of which we hear so much and read
so little, but--and this is the substance of the matter--it is
interesting, it is moving, and worth pages of choppy dialogue. You read
it, first of all, it may be in your youth, when your heart burnt within
you as you wondered what was going to happen, but you can return to it in
sober age and read it over again with a smile it has taken a lifetime to
manufacture. And then Miss Bronte's books! what rhetoric is there! And
_Eothen_! Why has not _Eothen_ gone the way of all other traces of
Eastern travel? It has humour--delightful humour, no doubt, but it is
its eloquence, that picture of the burning, beating sun following the
traveller by day, which keeps _Eothen_ alive.

Borrow's eloquence is splendid, manly, and desperately courageous. What
an apostrophe is that to old Crome at the end of the twenty-first
chapter! _Lavengro_ is full of riches. As for his courage, who else
could begin a passage 'O England,' and emerge triumphantly a page and a
half lower down as Borrow does in _The Bible in Spain_?

O England! long, long may it be ere the sun of thy glory sink beneath
the wave of darkness! Though gloomy and portentous clouds are now
gathering rapidly round thee, still, still may it please the Almighty
to disperse them, and to grant thee a futurity longer in duration and
still brighter in renown than thy past! Or if thy doom be at hand,
may that doom be a noble one, and worthy of her who has been styled
the Old Queen of the water! May thou sink, if thou dost sink, amidst
blood and flame, with a mighty noise, causing more than one nation to
participate in thy downfall! Of all fates, may it please the Lord to
preserve thee from a disgraceful and a slow decay; becoming ere
extinct a scorn and a mockery for those self-same foes who now, though
they envy and ab