His own griefs came back on Delmé; he groaned aloud. He traversed the deserts, he crossed lofty mountains, he knew thirst and privations. He was scoffed at and spat upon in an infidel country--he was tossed on the ocean--he shook hands with danger. He visited our wide Oriental possessions; and sojourned amid the spicy islands of the Indian Archipelago, where vegetation attains a magnificence unknown elsewhere, and animal life partakes of this unexampled exuberance,--where flowers of the most exquisite colours and fragrance charm the senses by day, and delicious plants saturate the air with their odours by night. Delmé extended his wanderings to the rarely visited "many isles," which stud the vast Pacific, and found that there too were fruitful and smiling regions. But not on the desert--nor on the mountains--nor in the land of the Moslem---nor on tempestuous seas--nor in those verdant islets, which seem to breathe of Paradise, to greet the wearied traveller; could Delmé's restless spirit find an abiding place, his thirst for foreign travel be slaked, or his heart know peace. He madly sought oblivion, which could not be accorded him. Chapter XVI. The Wanderer. "Then I consider'd life in all its forms, Of vegetables first, next zoophytes, The tribe that dwells upon the confine strange 'Twixt plants and fish; some are there from their mouth Spit out their progeny, and some that breed, By suckers from their base or tubercles, Sea-hedgehog, madrepore, sea-ruff, or pad, Fungus, or sponge, or that gelatinous fish, That taken from its element at once Stinks, melts, and dies a fluid; so from these, Through many a tribe of less equivocal life, Dividual or insect, up I ranged, From sentient to percipient, small advance, Next to intelligent, to rational next, So to half spiritual human kind, And what is more, is more than man may know. Last came the troublesome question--What am I?" * * * * * "And vain were the hat, the staff, and stole, And all outward signs were a snare, Unless the pilgrim's endanger'd soul Were inwardly clothed with prayer. "But the pilgrim prays--and then trials are light-- For prayer to him on his way, Resembles the pillar of fire by night, And the guiding cloud by day. "And salvation's helm the pilgrim wears, Or vain were all other dress; And the shield of faith the pilgrim bears, With the breastplate of righteousness. "At length his tears all wiped away; He enters the City of Light; And how gladly he changes his gown of grey, For Zion's robe of white." It was on the 22nd of October, 1836, that an emissary from his sister, sought Sir Henry Delmé. It was at the antipodes to his ancestral home; in Australia, that wonderful country, which--belied and calumniated, as she has hitherto been--presents some anomalous and creditable features.