11>6 RECOLLECTIONS OF CHATEAUBRIAND IN ENGLAND. 



with grace and playfulness those lighter themes which form the staple 

 topics of modern conversation. If, when some abstract question is 

 started some discussion nearly connected with the interests of na- 

 tions or of mankind at large 



" The gordian knot of it he will unloose, 

 Familiar as his garter " 



he is no less gifted with that happy versatility which can turn from 

 grave to gay which can abandon the domain of philosophical specu- 

 lation for the fairy land of poetry and romance. The first genial ray 

 of spring, piercing the substantial veil of fog and mist in which a 

 London atmosphere is usually enveloped, has often sufficed to draw 

 from him a rhapsody peculiarly his own, and, as may be seen from 

 the specimen which we subjoin, but slightly connected with the idea 

 that served him as his point de depart. On one such occasion he ex- 

 claimed " Were the choice of a residence left to me, I would fix my 

 abode in Rome. There all is grandeur, even in ruin all is sublimity 

 and recollection of former glory. In the environs that surround the 

 wrecks of ages, all is silence and solitude. In the midst of the long 

 tangled grass which overgrows the deserted fields, rises some solitary 

 column ; or, perhance, as in the days of infant Rome, groups of wild 

 steeds are seen approaching to slake their thirst in the waters of the 

 Tiber. In this genial climate, existence acquires double vigour 

 man breathes a purer air the warm sunshine of heaven gives new 

 elasticity to his movements, and may be said to clothe him like a gar- 

 ment. He quits the majestic solitude, and returning to the eternal 

 city, kneels before some aged minister of peace, and receives the 

 pious blessing, which in Rome is invoked alike upon the rich man's 

 purple and the beggar's rags." 



These were the poet's moments of sunshine fleeting and transi- 

 tory as the few brief rays of a London spring morning to which 

 they owed their birth ; his mind, like the external atmosphere which 

 affected its mercurial temperament, being soon overclouded and dark. 

 In his gloomy hours he was by no means nice as to the vehicle 

 through which his fretfulness might be vented, his vigorous para- 

 doxes being recklessly hurled against the subject under imme- 

 diate consideration. Sometimes he would inveigh bitterly against 

 smoky London " and all that it inherits" against the city of 

 steam-engines and rail-roads the metropolis of gas, coal, and 

 coke against the prosaic cockneys who, as he said, turn even the 

 elements to material use, burning the air, and the very earth on 

 which they tread. On such occasions his strictures, though unjust, 

 were not divested of a certain character of originality and playful- 

 ness. Crossing Hyde Park one day, with some friends, he suddenly 

 broke forth into a poetic and passionate anathema against some of the 

 finest blood horses that ever exhibited their paces round the ring. 

 Passing next from comparisons between the objects of his affected 

 disdain, and the proud steeds of Arabia, which he characterized as 

 possessing a sagacity approaching to intellect, the angry poet all at 

 once diverged into a rhapsody on the spirituality, as he was pleased 

 to term it, of the ass ! " In the East," said he, " the ass is superb. 



