A Song of Love and Life. SWEET is true love; it ne'er was given in vain. And live, because true love can never die. True love may give thee strength and will to live; Power which those only who have conquered know; And win the happiness thou deemèdst gone, Sweet Love, thou art not made to fade away; If life immortal live within thy breast, Earth's love may die; earth's charms must all decay; Earth's flowers bloom, and brighten, and then fall. God's love must live; God's truth can never change; GOD's joy to hearts which love is never strange; GOD's pity wills that love should pity all. Life here is full of sorrow, death, and sin; The cup of human life is often broken. And love as true and sweet as love unspoken. The sweetest love that ever filled thy heart And live, when sorrow makes thee long to die. 1861. Cloudy Memories of an Old Passport. ONE DAY IN DENMARK. BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA. I WENT one day last December to the Austrian Embassy in Chandos Street, Cavendish Square, to get my passport viséd for Venice. It was about the twentieth time that I had made up my mind to pay a visit to the Queen of the Adriatic; but, as usual, my intention was never carried out. It is not to be, I suppose. I am never to see the lagunes, take a stall at the Fenice, ride in the "omnibus" gondola from the railway-station, to the hotel, or sit up all night eating ices on the Place of St. Mark, with the Austrian military bands, "their mushick playin' chunes," as the Mulliganian bard has it, outside. It was all settled, so far as human proposing went; but, Providence disposing otherwise, I didn't go to Venice. My route was marked out, nevertheless. I intended to avoid the Alpine passage into Italy, some ugly accidents from avalanches having taken place on the St. Gothard, the Simplon, or the Splügen, I forget which; and the escalade of Mount Cenis being impossible, at this period of the year, to all but government couriers, and English detectives in quest of runaway bankrupts, I had arranged to take the jog-trot railway to Marseilles and Toulon, thence to skirt the Maritime Alps, in the diligence, to Nice, thence to take steamship for Genoa, and so up to Alessandria and Milan, and so, right through by rail, into Venetia. I had taken counsel of a wise citizen of the world, so sapient that he can travel all over it without letting his beard grow. A philosopher who climbs Mount Atlas clean shaven and in a shooting-jacket, and has interviews with Turkish pashas without subsequently assuming a tarbouch on the strength of his oriental acquaintance. To the pure all things are pure; and to my sage friend the wilds of Kabylia are as placid and decorous as King's-Bench Walk, Temple. His experience is fertile in "hints to vagabonds." It is astonishing how prone is your quiet well-bred English gentleman to claim clanship with Bohemia; and as, according to that respectable but somewhat senile organ of mild atheism and genteel sedition the Westminster Review, I am a Bohemian, and consequently a vagabond, I was very glad to take some hints about Venice from my friend. He told me how to make bargains by the day with the gondoliers; to stay at the Victoria in preference to Danielo's; to drink beer in lieu of wine, the want of cellarage being most unfavourable to the preservation both of body and bouquet in Venice; and to gird myself well with flannel, rheumatism being naturalised in the city of the Doges. In short, he showed me the entire carte du pays; and there lacked only the Austrian visa, and a roll of circular notes, towards my complete equipment for a trip to the Quadrilateral. However, I didn't go; and I dare say I shall mean as much as ever to go next year, and that the slip 'twixt the cup and the lip will be on a par with similar mischances in bygone enterprises. As a rule, I am dreadfully afraid of Austrian ambassadors, as represented by their humblest legation clerks, all over Europe. There is something about his Royal and Apostolic Majesty, the double-headed eagle on his scutcheon, the white coats of his grenadiers, and the yellow moustaches of his officers, that mislikes me much. I never enter the portals of an Austrian embassy without a nervous qualm pervading my frame; in fact, I suppose that blood is thicker than water, and that I share in that abhorrence for the Tedeschi which my forefathers, who groaned under their tyranny, to "groan" is the right word, I think,—may have experienced. However, I got my passport put en règle this particular day last December without any trouble; and was agreeably surprised to find that the usual fee of five shillings was not charged for the visa. The doublebeaded eagle is growing generous, I thought; and so determined to emulate his munificence by giving the powdered footman-a superb creature, who looked as though he could have awed disaffected Hungary by a single glance, and doubled up the Ban of Croatia in the twinkling of a bedstaff a florin. 'Twas a pretty compliment, the florin being an Austrian coin; and the footman grinned a superb approval. A wink even quivered for an instant on his lordly eyelid. I went out into Chandos Street with a light heart, and well satisfied with the result of my errand; only, I wish that his Excellency the Ambassador of his Royal and Apostolic Majesty would have the common decency and courtesy to provide a waiting-room for gentlemen who come to have their passports viséd for Venice, and not keep them cooling their heels in his entrance-hall, like lackeys. When I reached the street, I looked at my passport, which I had been too much flurried to examine while within the ambassadorial precincts. The Secretary of Legation must have had hard work to find a spare place for his signature. My credentials were very old and ragged; issued by Lord Clarendon, and covered front and back with signalements, visas, stamps, and signatures, in all kinds of handwriting, crabbed, scrawling, and blotted, in all kinds of coloured inks, more or less faded. There was a good deal of grease about my passport; each heraldic stamp of consulate or legation had an oleaginous nimbus round it, which had oozed out from the printing-ink. Lord Clarendon's arms at the bottom had nearly disappeared, and the unicorn in the royal arms at the top had lost his horn and his tail. The copper-plate platitudes about "let or hindrance," "aid and protection," were crossed and recrossed, and half obliterated by visas and timbres looming in a fog of blots through the flimsy paper. I turned the sheet all ways, and mused over the kingdoms and empires into which I had been, but with great "let or hindrance," permitted to enter, and where I had never received any thing like "aid or protection." Here were the old Calais police-marks; the stigmata of Boulogne and Lille, “vu pour Paris." Then came "vu à la Légation de Suède et de Norvège ;" again Austrian, Prussian, Belgian, Bavarian, Italian visas by the half-dozen. Then the Russians had taken possession of it, and decorated one half of the back with a full, false, and particular account of my birth, parentage, education, characteristics, and adventures, prior to my being vaccinated and subsequent to my first having my hair cut; at least so I conjectured from the prolixity of the closely written and totally illegible Sclavonic with which so many estimable officials of the Muscovite police had kept me so long waiting at frontier towns, and charged me so many silver roubles for. As I ran over this defaced and begrimed schedule, cloudy (not sunny) memories of foreign lands came dully trooping through my tired brain. All is changed, I sighed. Some of the kingdoms have abolished the passport system, others have come to grief,-kings, kingdoms, and passports,-and have no longer a place in the Almanach de Gotha. Some of the secretaries of legation have risen to be ministers plenipotentiaries; others may have been sent to Siberia, and are wheeling barrows full of spelter, now, with gyves upon their limbs. All, all changed. I looked at my own signature in the margin of the passport, written with a defiant hopeful boldness ten years ago. I couldn't write like that now. I signed my name again, beneath the old one, when I reached home. Alas, it seemed to have turned gray, and to be neuralgic and carbuncular, and to be a hypochondriacal, shaky, seedy, and, to tell though, somewhat of an imbecile signature. Basta. What was it Sterne said of Valetudinarian Smollett's book of "Travels in Italy"? didn't he accuse the "learned Smellfungus" of describing less the country he had visited than the state of his own "miserable feelings"? His reverence Don Lorenzo came himself to have "miserable feelings" not long afterwards; and here's the same to you, my hale and hearty friend. I was folding up the cloudy old passport, gingerly and tenderly folding it, not because I loved the thing, but because I knew that the slightest roughness would rend its flimsy creases into rags, when my eye caught a couple of visas, one consular, one police-official, that had hitherto escaped me. April 1856; that's it. "Kontoir fur Reisende: Betact: Kiöbnhavn," and a quantity of thick hard black grease, of which I could make nothing. Gesehen fur reise nach Copenhagen, and several lines of those peculiar German caligraphics which always remind me of mad Nat Lee's oft-quoted but much-ridiculed lines, "I've seen an unscrewed spider spin a thought, And walk away upon the wings of angels." There is nothing to my mind so like a "screwed-up spider" as the Teutonic handwriting. Turning, however, from the permit of the German Arachne to the Scandinavian kingdom, to which it had reference, I remembered that I had once spent a day in Denmark. One day and one night, no further do my Danish experiences extend, unless, indeed, subsequent sojourns in Schleswig Holstein, and in Altona (which, al though subject to the sway of his Danish Majesty, are not in Denmark proper), are to be taken into account. I arrived in the capital erst of King Claudius on a Sunday morning, and I left on the Monday at noon. Let me see if I can call up any cloudy memories about Copenhagen. It was quite by accident that I ever went there at all. I had no letters of introduction, and not a soul I knew in the city to call upon. I ought to have been at St. Petersburg a full week before; but, as the ice in the Baltic obstinately refused to break up, and I was eating my heart and my head off in the inconceivably dreary port of Stettin, and I was sick of going backwards and forwards to Berlin, I was prepared for any region, however inhospitable it might be to the North Pole itself, by way of a change. Indeed, I fancied that the young lady who was continually arranging her yellow back hair, in a mirror of the size and shape of a cocked-hat, at the casement opposite my hotel, was singing the song in Faust, "There was a king in Thule," to herself. "Go for Thule," I exclaimed. "Why not try Copenhagen?" suggested the landlord of the "Drei Kronen" at Stettin, who doubtless thought it far better that I should proceed thither, as I must return to Stettin to take shipping for Cronstadt, than that I should go back to Berlin, with the chance of never returning to the "Drei Kronen" at all. This was the period of my being haunted and persecuted by the malevolent Thomas Tidler aus Tyrol. It was thus he described himself over the shop, where he sold alpenstocks, pouches, and knives and toys made out of chamois-horn. His dépôt was just over against the "Three Crowns." He wore the full Tyrolese costume; but I am afraid that his speculation in Stettin was not of the most prosperous kind, for nobody ever came to buy chamois-horn; and he was wont to stand all day in high-crowned hat, shirt-sleeves, black velvet small-clothes, and those white stockings and ankle-jacks fashionable at the banks of Ischl, humming the Jödeln of his native heights to himself, and occasionally executing the slow movements of the Tyrolienne to keep himself warm. You may say there was nothing to excite disquiet or alarm in the appearance of such a character; but Thomas Tidler appeared to me as the embodied and vascular signboard of his establishment; and who, I should like to know, would wish to see a live Scotchman consulting his mull at the tobacconist's door; or a breathing Cariboo chewing pigtail thereat; or the wooden midshipman in Leadenhall Street positively shivering his timbers, or splicing his mainbraces in the flesh; or the Black Lion at Brentford actually roaring and wagging his tail? Carved and gilt, or stuffed, I could have borne with Thomas Tidler; but he was too much for me as the Tyrolese arms in flesh and blood. He had, moreover, a baleful habit of staring at me, and asking me day after day to buy the same boot-jack or goblet-I forget which now-of chamois-horn; and in the end I hated the harmless creature. "I will go away to Denmark," I said, "and see if there be any thing rotten in the state of it ;" so I sent the waiter to the Danish consulate (which was on a second floor in a back street, over a pastry |