The Holy Shrines of Learning, May no polluting flame Be lighted on one altar-stone By fiends who mock at shame, But cloudless light be shed abroad A guilty world to cheer, And men forget to worship God In superstitious fear. * * * * * IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND IN THE AUTUMN OF 1851. BY FREDERIKA BREMER. It is two years since I first found myself in England. When I was in England in the autumn of 1849, the cholera was there. A dense, oppressive atmosphere rested over its cities, as of a cloud pregnant with lightning. Hearses rolled through the streets. The towns were empty of people; for all who had the means of going had fled into the country; they who had not were compelled to remain. I saw shadowy figures, clad in black, stealing along the streets, more like ghosts than creatures of flesh and blood. Never before had I seen human wretchedness in such a form as I beheld it in Hull and in London. Wretchedness enough may be found, God knows, even in Stockholm, and it shows itself openly enough there in street and market. But it is there most frequently an undisguised, an unabashed wretchedness. It is not ashamed to beg, to show its rags, or its drunken countenance. It is a child of crime; and that is perhaps the most extreme wretchedness. But it is less painful to behold, because it seems to be suffering only its own deserts. One is more easily satisfied to turn one’s head aside and pass on. One thinks, “I cannot help that!” In England, however, misery had another appearance; it was not so much that of degradation as of want, pallid want. It was meagre and retiring; it ventured not to look up, or it looked up with a glance of hopeless beseeching—so spirit-broken! It tried to look respectable. Those men with coats and hats brushed till the nap was gone; those pale women in scanty, washed-out, but yet decent clothes—it was a sight which one could hardly bear. In a solitary walk of ten minutes in the streets of Hull, I saw ten times more want than I had seen in a ten months’ residence in Denmark.