Winter stripped the branches
Of the roadside tree;
But the frosty hours
Brought no change for me—
Save that I could better,
Through the branches brown,
See the tired travellers
Coming from the town.
Pitiless December
Rained, and hailed, and snowed,
On my garret window
Looking down the road.

At the last I saw it
(Not the form I sought),
Something brighter, purer,
Blessed my sleeping thought.
'Twas a white-robed angel,—
At his steadfast eyes
Paled the wild-fire brightness
Of old memories.
Nearer drew the vision,
While with bated breath
Some one seemed to whisper,
The Deliverer, "Death."
Then my dreaming spirit,
Eased of half its load,
Saw the white wings lessen
Down the dusty road.

God has soothed my sorrow,
He has purged my sin;
Earthly hopes have perished—
Heavenly rest I win.
Dull and dead endurance
Is no portion here;
I am strong to labour,
And my rest is near.
Lifting my dull glances
From the fields below,
So the light of Heaven
Settles on my brow.
O my God, I thank thee,
Who that angel showed,
From my garret window
Looking down the road.

SLEEPERS AWAKENED.

ABOUT ten months ago I came straight from
Seville, in the south of Spain, through Madrid
and Bayonne to Paris, and thence, without
drawing rein — if such things as reins can be
drawn in a railway train — to CALAIS, where I
was to wait for a person with a letter from
England. I had the gout at the time, and a
raging toothache; it had rained all the way
from Bordeaux, and I was excessively
miserable. Perhaps, of all the many miseries of
travelling (and I am beginning to think they
far outnumber its felicities), there is none so
acute as coming suddenly upon gloomy savage
Winter, with the knowledge that you have just
left summer behind you. Nothing could have
been more exquisite than the weather I had
been enjoying in Andalusia, down to a certain
Monday in March last. I used to sleep with
the windows open — which was very imprudent,
they told me — and I never ate fewer than half
a dozen oranges before breakfast — which was
more imprudent still, they said. I used to
sit till midnight in a café of the Calle de
los Sierpes, eating ices, and fancying myself
at the Dominica in the Antilles, and I
went to a gipsy fandango in a white waist-
coat and pantaloons. But what are you to
do in the clime of perpetual summer? Are
you to shiver, and wear a Welsh wig and tallow
your nose when the thermometer keeps rising
till it promises to rival the Luxor obelisk in
altitude? I left Seville absolutely sunburnt;
and for the sun to burn my countenance is
something like gilding refined gold. Imagine
my feelings, then, when I found the Landes near
Bordeaux rendered mistier than ever, by a
drizzling sleet, and the wretched shepherds,
looking more woebegone than ever, shivering
on their stilts. (By-the-by, I want to know why
the sheep in marshy districts should not like-
wise wear stilts? It would preserve them from
the foot-rot, which painful malady, I am given
to understand, decimates the flocks in wet
weather. An objection to the use of artificial
legs might be raised, on the score of sheep
being animals which are sent out that they may
pasture; and it might be difficult to cause the
grass to rise, mechanically, to a level with the
browsers' lips.) The discussion of an
untenable hypothesis is no bad pastime when
you are alone, and dull, and wretched, and the
theory of sheep on stilts enabled me to
withstand, till I reached Calais, a very strong temptation
to fling myself from the carriage window.
I forget what kind of weather they were having
in Paris. In fact, I had ceased to know
anything about Paris.

I reached Calais at about one o'clock in the
afternoon, and at the end of the week. I
found that between Monday in Seville and
Saturday in the department of the Pas de
Calais, there was the difference of a wide, wide
world. It had ceased raining for a time;
it had held up, apparently, for the kind
purpose of giving the frost a chance; and no patent
refrigerator could have done its work quicker
than the process of congelation which had
covered the streets of Calais, above the
puddles and the mud, with a thin coating of
ice. Everybody at Calais seemed to be
shivering; and the man at the station who puts the
foot-warmers into the carriages — they always
remind me, either of leaden coffins, or of sausage-
rolls with the sausages turned to hot water
—the man who distributes those articles, and
who pokes them against your ankles just as
your are dropping off to sleep, and drags them
out viciously as though they were wild animals
crouching in a corner of the cage — this man
was sitting on a pile of these leaden coffins (I
hope the water had become tepid), and
was blowing his fingers to keep himself
warm. I had done my best to scald the coats
of my stomach with coffee, at Amiens; but the
chicory of which it was composed, though it
smoked a great deal, would not scald. This
may account for my also shivering, and so
being in keeping with the people of Calais,