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What is to be thought of the poor shepherd girl from the hills and forests of Lorraine, that like the Hebrew shepherd boy from the hills and forests of Judæa rose suddenly out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious inspiration, rooted in deep pastoral solitudes, to a station in the van of armies, and to the more perilous station at the right hand of kings?
How truly marvellous is the description of these wind-swept, weed-grown solitudes that Robert Browning presents to us in what is perhaps the most truly Italian in feeling of all his poems, “The Englishman in Italy!” For here with the rich imagination, worthy of some of Shelley’s finest flights, is mingled an accurate appreciation of Nature, of which Wordsworth might well be proud; for the Lake poet himself could not have improved upon this exquisite description of the various shrubs and plants of a limestone hill-top in Italy.
He is always to be found in the Terai forests, and although very occasionally indeed met with in Tirhoot, where the population is very dense, and waste lands infrequent, he is yet often to be encountered in the solitudes of Oudh or Goruchpore, has been shot at and killed near Bettiah, and at our pig-sticking ground near Kuderent.
Deep silence reigned over this waste; no sign of life was visible; no flutter of wing, no hum of insect, no flash of lizard or reptile; even the shrill song of the cricket, that lover of burning solitudes, was unheard.
Rolled in a blanket she slept on lupin boughs, but was off at peep of day again, calling calling high and clear among the solitudes. During the second day her burro gave a rasping bray, and a hee-haw answered from the bush. It was Miguel's burro. He had come at last! Leaping to her feet, in her impatience, she ran to meet him, and found him lying on the earth, staring silently at the sky.
A strong feeling for the beauties of nature, as displayed in the solitudes the writers have left at home, breathes through its pages like wholesome village air.... It has very scant allusion to fine clothes, fine marriages, fine houses, or fine life." I am so happy as to possess a number of the "Lowell Offering," for August, 1844.
In thoughts like these the night wore away, the moonbeams that streamed through my window lighting up the spacious solitudes beyond, mead and creek, forest-land, mountaintop, and the silence without broken by the wild cry of the night hawk and the sibilant melancholy dirge of the shining chrysococyx, bird that never sings but at night, and obstinately haunts the roofs of the sick and dying, ominous of woe and death.
It made me feel quite ashamed of not having taken more interest in the progress of current events, to meet a party of emigrants driving miles through these solitudes to hear what I had passed heedlessly by when close under my hand.
Thus was instituted on the desolate shores of Fire Land the order of Knights of the Unchained Lion, with such rude solemnities as were possible in those solitudes. The harbour where the fleet was anchored was called the Chevaliers' Bay, but it would be in vain to look on modern maps for that heroic appellation.
"'Haughty solitudes'!" Christine derided. Mrs. Bogardus sighed with impatience, and Moya's face became set. "Well, here he quotes again," she haughtily resumed. "Anybody who is tired of this can be excused. Emerson won't mind, and I'm sure Paul won't!" She looked a mute apology to Paul's mother, who smiled and said, "Go on, dear.
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