is in the grave instead of the chamber,--not that he is _old_,
but that he might have been beside us last night. But in England the
dead are dead to purpose. One cannot believe they ever were alive, or
anything else than what they are now--names in school-books.

Sec. 6. Then that spirit of trimness. The smooth paving-stones; the
scraped, hard, even, rutless roads; the neat gates and plates, and
essence of border and order, and spikiness and spruceness. Abroad, a
country-house has some confession of human weakness and human fates
about it. There are the old grand gates still, which the mob pressed
sore against at the Revolution, and the strained hinges have never gone
so well since; and the broken greyhound on the pillar--still
broken--better so; but the long avenue is gracefully pale with fresh
green, and the courtyard bright with orange-trees; the garden is a
little run to waste--since Mademoiselle was married nobody cares much
about it; and one range of apartments is shut up--nobody goes into them
since Madame died. But with us, let who will be married or die, we
neglect nothing. All is polished and precise again next morning; and
whether people are happy or miserable, poor or prosperous, still we
sweep the stairs of a Saturday.[4]

Sec. 7. Now, I have insisted long on this English character, because I want
the reader to understand thoroughly the opposite element of the noble
picturesque; its expression, namely, of _suffering_, of _poverty_, or
_decay_, nobly endured by unpretending strength of heart. Nor only
unpretending, but unconscious. If there be visible pensiveness in the
building, as in a ruined abbey, it becomes, or claims to become,
beautiful; but the picturesqueness is in the unconscious suffering,--the
look that an old laborer has, not knowing that there is anything
pathetic in his grey hair, and withered arms, and sunburnt breast; and
thus there are the two extremes, the consciousness of pathos in the
confessed ruin, which may or may not be beautiful, according to the kind
of it; and the entire denial of all human calamity and care, in the
swept proprieties and neatness of English modernism: and, between these,
there is the unconscious confession of the facts of distress and decay,
in by-words; the world's hard work being gone through all the while, and
no pity asked for, nor contempt feared. And this is the expression of
that Calais spire, and of all picturesque things, in so far as they have
mental o