418 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



exertion ; and so he had to retire from the army on half-pay, 

 and a pension honourably earned. The history of his career 

 as a soldier he has told with singular interest, in one of the 

 earlier volumes of " Constable's Miscellany ;" and his poems 

 abound in snatches of description painfully true, drawn from 

 his experience of the military life, of scenes of stern misery 

 and grim desolation, of injuries received, and of sufferings 

 inflicted, that must have contrasted sadly in his mind, in 

 their character as gross realities, with the dreamy visions of 

 conquest and glory in which he had indulged at an earlier 

 time. The ruin of St Sebastian, complete enough, and at- 

 tended with circumstances of the horrible extreme enough, 

 to appal men long acquainted with the trade of war, must 

 have powerfully impressed an imaginative susceptible lad, 

 fresh from the domesticities of a rural manse, in whose quiet 

 neighbourhood the voice of battle had not been heard for 

 centuries, and surrounded by a simple people, remarkable for 

 the respect which they bear to human life. In all probabi- 

 lity, the power evinced in his description of the siege, and of 

 the utter desolation in which it terminated, is in part owing 

 to the fresh impressibility of his mind at the time. Such, 

 at least, was my feeling regarding it, as I caught myself 

 muttering some of its more graphic passages, and saw, from 

 the degree of alarm evinced by the boy who drove the mail- 

 gig, that the sounds were not quite lost in the rattle of that 

 somewhat rickety vehicle, and that he had come to entertain 

 serious doubts respecting the sanity of his passenger : 



" Sebastian, when I saw thee last, 



It was in Desolation's day, 

 As through thy voiceless streets I passed, 



Thy piles in heaps of rubbish lay ; 

 The roofless fragments of each wall 

 Bore many a dent of shell and ball ; 

 With blood were all thy gateways red, 

 And thou, a city of the dead ! 



