The International Weekly Miscellany - Volume I, No. 5 | Page 5

and appetite worth a hundred sermons, and no one
could produce such an impression in favor of amiableness as she did,

when she acted in gentle, generous, and confiding character. The way
in which she would take a friend by the cheek and kiss her, or make up
a quarrel with a lover, or coax a guardian into good humor, or sing
(without accompaniment) the song of, "Since then I'm doom'd," or "In
the dead of the night," trusting, as she had a right to do, and as the
house wished her to do, to the sole effect of her sweet, mellow, and
loving voice--the reader will pardon me, but tears of pleasure and regret
come into my eyes at the recollection, as if she personified whatsoever
was happy at that period of life, and which has gone like herself. The
very sound of the familiar word 'bud' from her lips (the abbreviation of
husband,) as she packed it closer, as it were, in the utterance, and
pouted it up with fondness in the man's face, taking him at the same
time by the chin, was a whole concentrated world of the power of
loving.
* * * * *
RESIDENCE AT CHELSEA.--REMOTENESS IN
NEARNESS.--From the noise and dust of the New Road, my family
removed to a corner in Chelsea where the air of the neighboring river
was so refreshing, and the quiet of the "no-thoroughfare" so full of
repose, that, although our fortunes were at their worst, and my health
almost of a piece with them, I felt for some weeks as if I could sit still
for ever, embalmed in the silence. I got to like the very cries in the
street for making me the more aware of it for the contrast. I fancied
they were unlike the cries in other quarters of the suburbs, and that they
retained something of the old quaintness and melodiousness which
procured them the reputation of having been composed by Purcell and
others. Nor is this unlikely, when it is considered how fond those
masters were of sporting with their art, and setting the most trivial
words to music in their glees and catches. The primitive cries of
cowslips, primroses, and hot cross buns, seemed never to have quitted
this sequestered region. They were like daisies in a bit of surviving
field. There was an old seller of fish in particular, whose cry of
"Shrimps as large as prawns," was such a regular, long-drawn, and
truly pleasing melody, that in spite of his hoarse, and I am afraid,
drunken voice, I used to wish for it of an evening, and hail it when it

came. It lasted for some years, then faded, and went out; I suppose,
with the poor old weather-beaten fellow's existence. This sense of quiet
and repose may have been increased by an early association of Chelsea
with something out of the pale; nay, remote. It may seem strange to
hear a man who has crossed the Alps talk of one suburb as being
remote from another. But the sense of distance is not in space only; it is
in difference and discontinuance. A little back-room in a street in
London is further removed from the noise, than a front room in a
country town. In childhood, the farthest local point which I reached
anywhere, provided it was quiet, always seemed to me a sort of end of
the world; and I remembered particularly feeling this, the only time
when I had previously visited Chelsea, which was at that period of
life.... I know not whether the corner I speak of remains as quiet as it
was. I am afraid not; for steamboats have carried vicissitude into
Chelsea, and Belgravia threatens it with her mighty advent. But to
complete my sense of repose and distance, the house was of that
old-fashioned sort which I have always loved best, familiar to the eyes
of my parents, and associated with childhood. It had seats in the
windows, a small third room on the first floor, of which I made a
sanctum, into which no perturbation was to enter, except to calm itself
with religious and cheerful thoughts (a room thus appropriated in a
house appears to me an excellent thing;) and there were a few
lime-trees in front, which in their due season diffused a fragrance.
[Footnote 1: The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt. Two volumes. Harper
& Brothers. 1850.]
* * * * *
LAMARTINE'S NEW ROMANCE.
The great poet of affairs, philosophy, and sentiment, before leaving the
scenes of his triumphs and misfortunes for his present visit to the East,
confided to the proprietors of Le Constitutionel a new chapter of his
romanticized memoirs to be published in the feuilleton of that journal,
under the name of "Genevieve." This work,