Chapter III: Part 3

Mortality in the Metropolis seems regulated by a variety of circumstances, the principal being the elevation of each district above the level of the river Thames; the number of persons who live in the same house; the size and character of the house as regards ventilation and cleanliness; the state of the sewerage; the number of paupers in the neighbourhood; and the abundant and good, or scanty and bad, supply of water. Each London parish has its rank and value in the registrar’s records of health and death; and the figures are so exact, that there is no evading the verdict they pronounce. At first thought, one might be inclined to expect that all the health would be found where all the wealth and fashion are congregated. But it is not so. As a rule, those districts stand well whose inhabitants are most blessed with the good things of this life, but, running through the catalogue as arranged in the order of their salubrity, we find some localities above the average of health—nay, one at the very top—which fashion knows nothing of.

In these statements of the registrar, the different districts of the Metropolis are placed in a list according to their healthiness, those in which the fewest persons die in a year out of a given equal number, standing first, followed by those next in sanitary order, until we come down to those which are but just above the average for all London. Passing that Rubicon, we see the names of those parishes in which death gets more than his proper proportion of victims every year; and then, one after another, down, down the list, until we reach its lowest depths, in those places where filth and fever reign paramount, and where such a destroyer as Cholera finds hundreds of victims already weakened by previous unhealthy influences, and ready to fall a rapid and easy prey.

Let us go through this graduated scale, that shows how health and disease struggle for the mastery, and how death turns the balance.

First on the list stands Lewisham, a large parish stretching from Blackheath across the open hilly fields towards Norwood, and including the hamlet of Sydenham. Its rural character, scattered population, and good water, explain its pre-eminence on the sanitary scale. The second name on the list carries us at once from a green suburban parish to one of the centres of fashion and aristocracy,—to St. George, Hanover Square. The presence of this parish, so high up on the scale, is due to several circumstances; and its claims to such prominence are more artificial than those of its rural competitor for the palm of healthfulness. The scale is made out from the census of 1841, which was taken during the height of the London season, when St. George’s was of course much fuller than it is on the general average of the year. Its population, too, is to a great extent composed of servants “in place,” and, therefore, generally young and in good health, and who, when dangerously sick, are sent to the hospitals, or to the country to die. The masters and mistresses of St. George’s, also, are so circumstanced, that when in bad health they can try the sea-air, or retire to country seats. All these facts tend to lessen the mortality of the district, and thus tend to place it high up on the sanitary scale. Its advantages are, an average elevation of forty-nine feet above the high water mark of the Thames; its neighbourhood to the parks; its wide open streets; a supply of water drawn from a Company whose system of filtration is very good; a comparatively thin population, compared with its extent, there being, in this parish, only sixty-six persons to an acre; and the size and character of its houses, which return an average rental of 153_l._ a year.

From the fashionable “west end” we have to travel to a suburban spot for the third place in rank on the health-scale. It is the sub-district of Hampstead. All who have been upon its breezy heath, with its elevation three or four hundred feet above the river, and its open view of the surrounding country, will readily understand why Hampstead should rank high in salubrity—though its average of rental may be low, and though more persons (as they do) live in each house than in the houses of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe.

Fourth on the list comes Hackney, which has only thirteen persons to an acre. This advantage will be seen more strongly, when we know that Hampstead has but six, and Lewisham, but two; whilst East London has two hundred and eighty, and Southwark, one hundred and sixty-five persons per acre. Hackney also has water from the New River, a comparatively pure source; and, though its houses are small, with a rental of but 35_l._, the number of occupants to each is but seven.

For the fifth in order of salubrity we have again to cross the Thames. It is Camberwell. This parish lies very low, being only four feet above the water mark; but, then, it is fringed on one side by the open country; is sheltered from cold winds; is thinly peopled, having only twelve persons to an acre, and only six occupants to a house. Its drainage is, almost necessarily, bad, but its neighbourhood to the green fields compensates for many sanitary evils.

Wandsworth, with a burden of poor rates almost equal in poundage to that inflicted upon Southwark and Lambeth comes next. The recommendations of Wandsworth are, a population of only four to an acre. This indication of ample open spaces explains the general healthiness of the parish. Its position and bad drainage have rendered it liable to very heavy loss from epidemics. Cholera found a larger proportion of victims in Wandsworth than in the densest peopled parish on the north of the river.

“Merry Islington” ranks only seventh in spite of its high and dry position, and its New River water, and its neighbouring fields. Its elevation is eighty-eight feet above the river; its density of population, twenty-five to an acre; its average rental 35_l._; its annual deaths, one in fifty.

Kensington and Chelsea follow next, and with them are included Brompton, Hammersmith, and Fulham. They all lie low, but are in pleasant company with fields and open spaces; their people are well to do in the world, and a large portion drink good water.

The City of London district—that is, the portion of the city round about the Mansion House, and including the houses and warehouses of the rich traders, who cluster near the Lord Mayor’s chosen dwelling-place—comes next in order. This is explained by the elevation of the ground, which is thirty-eight feet above the river; by the value of the property (average rental 117_l._) which excludes the poor; by the fact that the Lord Mayor and his neighbours do not drink Thames water; and that their wealth enables them to live well, and to obtain the best medical aid,—both for rich and poor. The most affluent also reside out of town, and many of their old people are drafted off in their old age to alms-houses, and to country unions. The mortality of this part of the city is two hundred and fourteen a year out of ten thousand living.

Next after the neighbourhood of the civic ruler, we have the locality which has been chosen for the palace of the sovereign—St. James’s. The population of this parish is dense,—being two hundred and nine to an acre, though its rentals are high. The palace stands in by no means the best portion of the district, but the saving points are the parks and the absence of Thames water.

St. Pancras follows St. James’s, its recommendations being an elevation of eighty feet above the river, and a population not one-third so closely packed as that of the parish occupied by the palace. Its density is sixty persons to an acre. Pancras, however, has many poor, and consequently heavy rates.

Marylebone, its neighbour, claims to follow Pancras, with a greater elevation and a better class of houses, yet with bad drainage and a heavier mortality. In Marylebone two hundred and twenty-two persons die in a year out of ten thousand. The population is more dense than in the poorer district of Pancras, but the near neighbourhood of Regent’s Park and open country about Primrose Hill has, of course, a favourable influence.

We have now to re-cross the river for the thirteenth place upon this London Sanitary Scale. It is Newington, a suburban parish, with a level two feet below the water mark, and with bad water, yet having fewer deaths than more noted and more wealthy quarters. Like Wandsworth, however, it suffered severely from Cholera, as its swampy position would lead one to expect.

The district round the palace of the Archbishop—Lambeth—follows next in order. It is raised but a very few feet above the high water level; its rents are low, its poor rates high, its nuisances many; and its water supply bad. But it has the air-draught from the river on one side, and it is not very far from the fields on the other; and more than all, it has but thirty-nine persons to an acre, and so it escapes with fewer deaths in a year than its unfavourable position would lead one to anticipate. It is, however, another of those spots where Cholera made great havoc.

From what may be called one river side extremity of South London, we skip over the central water-side parishes, and go to the opposite extremity of the metropolis to find at Greenwich our next healthiest district. Like Lambeth, this place lies low, is badly drained, and has a poor class of houses, and consequently of people. The secret of its position on the scale of health is to be found in the fact that the population is not dense, being only twenty-one to an acre; that it has a fine park for a playground, and is in near neighbourhood to Blackheath, and thence to the open and healthy hills and fields of Kent.

Now we must return again to the centre of London for its next most healthy parish. It is St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields; but having, it is almost needless to say, no rural character, except by name. Trafalgar Square, with its fountains, is almost its only enjoyable open space. The density of population is not over great for such a position; the rental high; the deaths two hundred and forty to ten thousand living each year.

Away east again for our next and last parish that stands above the general average of London. Stepney is the place, with its multitude of small houses at low rentals. It has its water from the river Lea, and its inhabitants have not very far to go when they wish for a ramble in the fields. Its yearly contribution to our total mortality is two hundred and forty-two out of ten thousand souls.

And here a dark line has to be drawn; for Stepney is close down upon the average mortality of all London. Each parish already named pays less than the average tribute to death—those presently to be enumerated pay more. The contributions vary from Clerkenwell, which is the least unhealthy on the black list to Whitechapel, which is the most unhealthy. This last parish indeed is the worst in all the metropolis. Between the two extremes of insalubrity, the districts range in the following order: Clerkenwell, brought down in the scale by its nests of poverty, and doubtless, by its huge over-gorged grave-yard. Bethnal Green, with its host of small houses, and average rental of only 9_l._ The Strand—the great thoroughfare of fine shops—with a back neighbourhood of filthy alleys and riverside abominations. Shoreditch, with its stock of poor people and old clothes. Westminster—regal, historical Westminster—raised but two feet above the water level, and famous alike for its abbey, its palace, and its rookeries. Bermondsey, just level with the water line, and poisoned by open drains and unsavoury factories. Rotherhithe, damp and foggy. St. Giles’s, another spot renowned for vice, poverty, and dirt. St. George’s, Southwark, low, poor, and densely crowded. Next come the two portions of the City of London, technically described as East London and West London, being in fact those parts beyond the centre surrounding the Mansion House—the portions indeed especially indulged with the frowsiness of Cripplegate and the choked-up smells of Leadenhall; the abominations of Smithfield; the exhalations of the Fleet ditch; the fever-engendering closeness of the courts off Fleet Street; and the smoky, ill-smelling sinuosities of Whitefriars. Next below these “City of London districts” we have Holborn, with a density of two hundred and thirty-seven to an acre, and a yearly mortality of two hundred and sixty-six to ten thousand living. Then St. George’s in the East, with a population far less closely packed than that of Holborn, yet sending two hundred and eighty-nine souls to judgment every year out of ten thousand living. Next St. Saviour’s and St. Olave’s, the two other Southwark parishes who drink Thames water taken from the stream near their own bridge, and therefore below the Fleet ditch. St. Luke’s, the locality of another rookery. And, lastly, the zero of this register, Whitechapel—with its shambles, its poverty, its vice, and its heavy quota of two hundred and ninety deaths a year out of ten thousand living.

This glance at the results displayed in the registrar’s thick volume of figures, published last year, gives us not only an idea of the curious information to be gleaned from the labours of Mr. Farr and his brother officers, but shows also how unevenly death visits the different portions of our huge city. If from our family of two millions the destroyer takes a thousand souls a week to their final account, the first and most certain to fall victims are those who, from ignorance, or recklessness, or poverty, outrage the natural laws by which alone health and life can be preserved.

A comparison between the chances of death which the Londoner runs as compared with those suffered by his fellow countrymen in other districts of England, might be put familiarly somewhat after this fashion. If a man’s acquaintances were fixed at fifty-two in number, and they lived in scattered places over England, he would annually lose one by death in forty-five. If they lived in the southeastern counties, the loss would be at the lower rate of one in fifty-two. If they all lived in London, he would lose one out of thirty-nine.

This additional mortality is the penalty now being, day by day, inflicted upon sinners against sanitary laws in the English metropolis.

BED.

“Oh, Sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole!”

Was the heart’s cry of the Ancient Mariner at the recollection of the blessed moment when the fearful curse of life in death fell off him and the heavenly sleep first “slid into his soul.” “Blessings on sleep!” said honest Sancho Panza: “it wraps one all round like a mantle!”—a mantle for the weary human frame, lined softly, as with the down of the eider-duck, and redolent of the soothing odours of the poppy. The fabled Cave of Sleep was in the Land of Darkness. No ray of the sun, or moon, or stars, ever broke upon that night without a dawn. The breath of somniferous flowers floated in on the still air from the grotto’s mouth. Black curtains hung round the ever-sleeping god; the Dreams stood around his couch; Silence kept watch at the portals. Take the winged Dreams from the picture, and what is left? The sleep of matter.

The dreams that come floating through our sleep, and fill the dormitory with visions of love or terror—what are they? Random freaks of the fancy? Or is sleep but one long dream, of which we see only fragments, and remember still less? Who shall explain the mystery of that loosening of the soul and body, of which night after night whispers to us, but which day after day is unthought of? Reverie, sleep, trance—such are the stages between the world of man and the world of spirits. Dreaming but deepens as we advance. Reverie deepens into the dreams of sleep—sleep into trance—trance borders on death. As the soul retires from the outer senses, as it escapes from the trammels of the flesh, it lives with increased power within. Spirit grows more spirit-like as matter slumbers. We can follow the development up to the last stage. What is beyond?

“And in that _sleep of death_, what dreams may come!”

says Hamlet—pausing on the brink of eternity, and vainly striving to scan the inscrutable. Trance is an awful counterpart of sleep and death—mysterious in itself, appalling in its hazards. Day after day noise has been hushed in the dormitory—month after month it has seen a human frame grow weaker and weaker, wanner, more deathlike, till the hues of the grave coloured the face of the living. And now he lies, motionless, pulseless, breathless. It is not sleep—is it death?

Leigh Hunt is said to have perpetrated a very bad pun connected with the dormitory, and which made Charles Lamb laugh immoderately. Going home together late one night, the latter repeated the well-known proverb, “A home’s a home, however homely.” “Aye,” added Hunt, “and a bed’s a bed however _bedly_.” It is a strange thing, a bed. Somebody has called it a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it reluctantly, and leave it with regret. Once within the downy precincts of the four posts, how loth we are to make our exodus into the wilderness of life. We are as enamoured of our curtained dwelling as if it were the Land of Goshen or the Cave of Circe. And how many fervent vows have those dumb posts heard broken! every fresh perjury rising to join its cloud of hovering fellows, each morning weighing heavier and heavier, on our sluggard eyelids. A caustic proverb says;—we are all “good risers at night;” but woe’s me for our agility in the morning. It is a failing of our species, ever ready to break out in all of us, and in some only vanquished after a struggle painful as the sundering of bone and marrow. The Great Frederic of Prussia found it easier, in after life, to rout the French and Austrians, than in youth to resist the seductions of sleep. After many single-handed attempts at reformation, he had at last to call to his assistance an old domestic, whom he charged, on pain of dismissal, to pull him out of bed every morning at two o’clock. The plan succeeded, as it deserved to succeed. All men of action are impressed with the importance of early rising. “When you begin to turn in bed, its time to turn out,” says the old Duke; and we believe his practice has been in accordance with his precept. Literary men—among whom, as Bulwer says, a certain indolence seems almost constitutional—are not so clear upon this point: they are divided between Night and Morning, though the best authorities seem in favour of the latter. Early rising is the best _elixir vitæ_: it is the only lengthener of life that man has ever devised. By its aid the great Buffon was able to spend half a century—an ordinary lifetime—at his desk; and yet had time to be the most modish of all the philosophers who then graced the gay metropolis of France.

Sleep is a treasure and a pleasure; and, as you love it, guide it warily. Over-indulgence is ever suicidal, and destroys the pleasure it means to gratify. The natural times for our lying down and rising up are plain enough. Nature teaches us, and unsophisticated mankind followed her. Singing birds and opening flowers hail the sunrise, and the hush of groves and the closed eyelids of the parterre mark his setting. But “man hath sought out many inventions.” We prolong our days into the depths of night, and our nights into the splendour of day. It is a strange result of civilisation! It is not merely occasioned by that thirst for varied amusement which characterises an advanced stage of society—it is not that theatres, balls, dancing, masquerades, require an artificial light, for all these are or have been equally enjoyed elsewhere beneath the eye of day. What _is_ the cause, we really are not philosopher enough to say; but the prevalence of the habit must have given no little pungency to honest Benjamin Franklin’s joke, when, one summer, he announced to the Parisians as a great discovery—that the sun rose each morning at four o’clock; and that, whereas, they burnt no end of candles by sitting up at night, they might rise in the morning and have light for nothing. Franklin’s “discovery,” we dare say, produced a laugh at the time, and things went on as before. Indeed so universal is this artificial division of day and night, and so interwoven with it are the social habits, that we shudder at the very idea of returning to the natural order of things. A Robespierre could not carry through so stupendous a revolution. Nothing less than an avatar of Siva the Destroyer—Siva with his hundred arms, turning off as many gaspipes, and replenishing his necklace of human skulls by decapitating the leading conservatives—could have any chance of success; and, ten to one, with our gassy splendours, and seducing glitter, we should convert that pagan devil ere half his work was done.

But of all the inventions which perverse ingenuity has sought out, the most incongruous, the most heretical against both nature and art, is Reading in Bed. Turning rest into labour, learning into ridicule. A man had better be up. He is spoiling two most excellent things by attempting to join them. Study and sleep—how incongruous! It is an idle coupling of opposites, and shocks a sensible man as much as if he were to meet in the woods the apparition of a winged elephant. Only fancy an elderly or middle-aged man (for youth is generally orthodox on this point,) sitting up in bed, spectacles on his nose, a Kilmarnock on his head, and his flannel jacket round his shivering shoulders,—doing what? Reading? It may be so—but he winks so often, possibly from the glare of the candle, and the glasses now and then slip so far down on his nose, and his hand now and then holds the volume so unsteadily, that if he himself didn’t assure us to the contrary, we should suppose him half asleep. We are sure it must be a great relief to him when the neglected book at last tumbles out of bed, to such a distance that he cannot recover it.

Nevertheless, we have heard this extraordinary custom excused on the no less extraordinary ground of its being a soporific. For those who require such things, Marryat gives a much simpler recipe—namely, to mentally repeat any scraps of poetry you can recollect; if your own, so much the better. The monks of old, in a similar emergency, used to repeat the seven Penitential Psalms. Either of these plans, we doubt not, will be found equally efficacious, if one is able to use them—if anxiety of mind does not divert him from his task, or the lassitude of illness disable him for attempting it. Sleep, alas! is at times fickle and coy; and, like most sublunary friends, forsakes us when most wanted. Reading in that repertory of many curious things, the “Book of the Farm,” we one day met with the statement that “a pillow of hops will ensure sleep to a patient in a delirious fever when every other expedient fails.” We made a note of it. Heaven forbid that the recipe should ever be needed for us or ours! but the words struck a chord of sympathy in our heart with such poor sufferers, and we saddened with the dread of that awful visitation. The fever of delirium! when incoherent words wander on the lips of genius; when the sufferer stares strangely and vacantly on his ministering friends, or starts with freezing horror from the arms of familiar love! Ah! what a dread tenant has the dormitory then. No food taken for the body, no sleep for the brain! a human being surging with diabolic strength against his keepers—a human frame gifted with superhuman vigour only the more rapidly to destroy itself! Less fearful to the eye, but more harrowing to the soul, is the dormitory whose walls enclose the sleepless victim of Remorse. No poppies or mandragora for him! His malady ends only with the fever of life. _Ends?_ Grief, anxiety, “the thousand several ills that flesh is heir to,” pass away before the lapse of time or the soothings of love, and sleep once more folds its dove-like wings above the couch.

“If there be a regal solitude,” says Charles Lamb, “it is a bed. How the patient lords it there; what caprices he acts without control! How king-like he sways his pillow,—tumbling and tossing, and shifting and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, and moulding it to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. He changes _sides_ oftener than a politician. Now he lies full length, then half-length, obliquely, transversely, head and feet quite across the bed; and none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four curtains he is absolute. They are his Mare Clausum. How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man’s self to himself! He is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated on him as his only duty. ’Tis the two Tables of the Law to him. He has nothing to think of but how to get well. What passes out of doors or within them, so he hear not the jarring of them, affects him not.”

In this climate a sight of the sun is prized; but we love to see it most from bed. A dormitory fronting the east, therefore, so that the early sunbeams may rouse us to the dewy beauties of morning, we love. Let there also be festooned roses without the window, that on opening it the perfume may pervade the realms of bed. Our night-bower should be simple—neat as a fairy’s cell, and ever perfumed with the sweet air of heaven. It is not a place for showy things, or costly. As fire is the presiding genius in other rooms, so let water, symbol of purity, be in the ascendant here; water, fresh and unturbid as the thoughts that here make their home—water, to wash away the dust and sweat of a weary world. Let no _fracas_ disturb the quiet of the dormitory. We go there for repose. Our tasks and our cares are left outside, only to be put on again with our hat and shoes in the morning. It is an asylum from the bustle of life—it is the inner shrine of our household gods—and should be respected accordingly. We never entered during the ordinary process of bed-making—pillows tossed here, blankets and sheets pitched hither and thither in wildest confusion, chairs and pitchers in the middle of the floor, feathers and dust everywhere—without a jarring sense that sacrilege was going on, and that the _genius loci_ had departed. Rude hands were profaning the home of our slumbers!

A sense of security pervades the dormitory. A healthy man in bed is free from everything but dreams, and once in a lifetime, or after adjudging the Cheese Premium at an Agricultural Show—the nightmare. We once heard a worthy gentleman, blessed with a very large family of daughters, declare he had no peace in his house except in bed. There we feel as if in a City of Refuge, secure alike from the brawls of earth and the storms of heaven. Lightning, say old ladies, won’t come through blankets. Even tigers, says Humboldt, “will not attack a man in his hammock.” Hitting a man when he’s down is stigmatised as villainous all the world over; and lions will rather sit with an empty stomach for hours than touch a man before he awakes. Tricks upon a sleeper! Oh, villainous! Every perpetrator of such unutterable treachery should be put beyond the pale of society. The First of April should have no place in the calendar of the dormitory. We would have the maxim “Let sleeping dogs lie,” extended to the human race. And an angry dog, certainly, is a man roused needlessly from his slumbers. What an outcry we Northmen raised against the introduction of Greenwich time, which defrauded us of fifteen minutes’ sleep in the morning; and how indiscriminate the objurgations lavished upon printers’ devils! Of all sinners against the nocturnal comfort of literary men, these imps are the foremost; and possibly it was from their malpractices in such matters that they first acquired their diabolic cognomen.

The nightcap is not an elegant head-dress, but its comfort is undeniable. It is a diadem of night; and what tranquillity follows our self-coronation! It is priceless as the invisible cap of Fortunatus; and, viewless beneath its folds, our cares cannot find us out. It is graceless. Well; what then? It is not meant for the garish eye of day, nor for the quizzing-glass of our fellow-men, or of the ridiculing race of women; neither does it outrage any taste for the beautiful in the happy sleeper himself. We speak as bachelors, to whom the pleasures of a manifold existence are unknown. Possibly the æsthetics of night are not uncared for when a man has another self to please, and when a pair of lovely eyes are fixed admiringly on his upper story; but such is the selfishness of human nature, that we suspect this abnegation of comfort will not long survive the honeymoon. The French, ever enamoured of effect, and who, we verily believe, even _sleep_ “_posé_,” sometimes substitute the many-coloured silken handkerchief for the graceless “_bonnet-de-nuit_.” But all such substitutes are less comfortable and more troublesome; and of all irritating things, the most irritating is a complex operation in undressing. Æsthetics at night, and for the weary! No, no. The weary man frets at every extra button or superfluous knot, he counts impatiently every second that keeps him from his couch, and flies to the arms of sleep as to those of his mistress. Nevertheless, French novelette writers make a great outcry against nightcaps. We remember an instance. A husband—rather a good-looking fellow—suspects that his wife is beginning to have too tender thoughts towards a glossy-ringletted Lothario who is then staying with them. So, having accidentally discovered that Lothario slept in a huge peeked nightcowl, and knowing that ridicule would prove the most effectual disenchanter, he fastened a string to his guest’s bell, and passed it into his own room.

At the dead of night, when all were fast asleep, suddenly Lothario’s bell rang furiously. Upstarted the lady—“their guest must be ill;”—and accompanied by her husband, elegantly coiffed in a turbaned silk handkerchief, she entered the room whence the alarum had sounded. They find Lothario sitting up in bed—his cowl rising pyramid-fashion, a fool’s cap all but the bells—bewildered and in ludicrous consternation at being surprised thus by the fair Angelica; and, unable to conceal his chagrin, he completes his discomfiture by bursting out in wrathful abuse of his laughing host for so betraying his weakness for nightcaps.

The Poetry of the Dormitory! It is an inviting but too delicate a subject for our rough hands. Do not the very words call up a vision? By the light of the stars we see a lovely head resting on a downy pillow; the bloom of the rose is on that young cheek, and the half-parted lips murmur as in a dream: “Edward!” Love is lying like light at her heart, and its fairy wand is showing her visions. May her dreams be happy! “Edward!” Was it a sigh that followed that gentle invocation? What would the youth give to hear that murmur,—to gaze like yonder stars on his slumbering love. Hush! are the morning-stars singing together—a lullaby to soothe the dreamer? A low dulcet strain floats in through the window; and soon, mingling with the breathings of the lute, the voice of youth. The harmony penetrates through the slumbering senses to the dreamer’s heart; and ere the golden curls are lifted from the pillow, she is conscious of all. The serenade begins anew. What does she hear?

“Stars of the summer night!
Far in yon azure deeps,
Hide, hide your golden light!
She sleeps!
My lady sleeps!
Sleeps!

Dreams of the summer night!
Tell her her lover keeps
Watch! while in slumbers light
She sleeps!
My lady sleeps!
Sleeps!”[3]

Footnote 3:

The first and last stanzas of a Serenade of Longfellow’s.

Published at the Office, No 16, Wellington Street North, Strand.
Printed by BRADBURY & EVANS, Whitefriars, London.

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Page Changed from Changed to

320 Reisen in der Niederlanden. Reisen in den Niederlanden.
Travels in the Netherlands Travels in the Netherlands

● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Renumbered footnotes. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_. ● The caret (^) is used to indicate superscript, whether applied to a single character (as in 2^d) or to an entire expression (as in 1^{st}).