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 — nay¹ 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, receding², diminutive³; 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 overcast⁴, its cold, its stormy hours. Second, X—— huge, dingy⁵; the canvas cracked and smoked; a yellow sky, sooty clouds; no sun, no azure⁶; the verdure of the suburbs blighted⁷ and sullied — a very dreary⁸ 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 syllables⁹, 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 ascending¹⁰ from the clods — haloed most of them — but while I gaze on their vapoury forms, and strive to

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