to leave X---- the next
morning, and should certainly not have another opportunity of bidding
him good-bye. The front door banged to.

"Let him go," said I, "we shall meet again some day."

CHAPTER VII.

READER, perhaps you were never in Belgium? Haply you don't know the
physiognomy of the country? You have not its lineaments defined upon
your memory, as I have them on mine?

Three--nay four--pictures line the four-walled cell where are stored for
me the records of the past. First, Eton. All in that picture is in far
perspective, receding, diminutive; but freshly coloured, green, dewy,
with a spring sky, piled with glittering yet showery clouds; for my
childhood was not all sunshine--it had its overcast, its cold, its
stormy hours. Second, X----, huge, dingy; the canvas cracked and smoked;
a yellow sky, sooty clouds; no sun, no azure; the verdure of the suburbs
blighted and sullied--a very dreary scene.

Third, Belgium; and I will pause before this landscape. As to the
fourth, a curtain covers it, which I may hereafter withdraw, or may not,
as suits my convenience and capacity. At any rate, for the present it
must hang undisturbed. Belgium! name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name
that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such
as no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet or classic, can
produce. Belgium! I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight.
It stirs my world of the past like a summons to resurrection; the graves
unclose, the dead are raised; thoughts, feelings, memories that slept,
are seen by me ascending from the clouds--haloed most of them--but while
I gaze on their vapoury forms, and strive to ascertain definitely their
outline, the sound which wakened them dies, and they sink, each and all,
like a light wreath of mist, absorbed in the mould, recalled to urns,
resealed in monuments. Farewell, luminous phantoms!

This is Belgium, reader. Look! don't call the picture a flat or a dull
one--it was neither flat nor dull to me when I first beheld it. When I
left Ostend on a mild February morning, and found myself on the road
to Brussels, nothing could look vapid to me. My sense of enjoyment
possessed an edge whetted to the finest, untouched, keen, exquisite.
I was young; I had good health; pleasure and I had never met; no
indulgence of hers had enervated or sated one faculty of my nature.
Liberty I clasped in my arms for the first time, and the influence of
her smi