An Englishman in adversity is a very respectable character; he
does not lose his dignity, but merely comes to a proper conception of
himself. It is rather touching to an observer to see how much the
universal heart is in this matter,--to see the merchants gathering round
the telegraphic messages, posted on the pillars of the Exchange
news-room, the people in the street who cannot afford to buy a paper
clustering round the windows of the news-offices, where a copy is pinned
up,--the groups of corporals and sergeants at the recruiting rendezvous,
with a newspaper in the midst of them and all earnest and sombre, and
feeling like one man together, whatever their rank. I seem to myself
like a spy or a traitor when I meet their eyes, and am conscious that I
neither hope nor fear in sympathy with them, although they look at me in
full confidence of sympathy. Their heart "knoweth its own bitterness,"
and as for me, being a stranger and all alien, I "intermeddle not with
their joy."
October 9th.--My ancestor left England in 1630. I return in 1853. I
sometimes feel as if I myself had been absent these two hundred and
twenty-three years, leaving England just emerging from the feudal system,
and finding it, on my return, on the verge of republicanism. It brings
the two far-separated points of time very closely together, to view the
matter thus.
October 16th.--A day or two ago arrived the sad news of the loss of the
Arctic by collision with a French steamer off Newfoundland, and the loss
also of three or four hundred people.
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