RESIDENCE AT CHELSEA.--REMOTENESS IN NEARNESS.--From the noise and dust of the New Road, my family removed to a corner in Chelsea where the air of the neighboring river was so refreshing, and the quiet of the "no-thoroughfare" so full of repose, that, although our fortunes were at their worst, and my health almost of a piece with them, I felt for some weeks as if I could sit still for ever, embalmed in the silence. I got to like the very cries in the street for making me the more aware of it for the contrast. I fancied they were unlike the cries in other quarters of the suburbs, and that they retained something of the old quaintness and melodiousness which procured them the reputation of having been composed by Purcell and others. Nor is this unlikely, when it is considered how fond those masters were of sporting with their art, and setting the most trivial words to music in their glees and catches. The primitive cries of cowslips, primroses, and hot cross buns, seemed never to have quitted this sequestered region. They were like daisies in a bit of surviving field. There was an old seller of fish in particular, whose cry of "Shrimps as large as prawns," was such a regular, long-drawn, and truly pleasing melody, that in spite of his hoarse, and I am afraid, drunken voice, I used to wish for it of an evening, and hail it when it came. It lasted for some years, then faded, and went out; I suppose, with the poor old weather-beaten fellow's existence. This sense of quiet and repose may have been increased by an early association of Chelsea with something out of the pale; nay, remote. It may seem strange to hear a man who has crossed the Alps talk of one suburb as being remote from another. But the sense of distance is not in space only; it is in difference and discontinuance. A little back-room in a street in London is further removed from the noise, than a front room in a country town. In childhood, the farthest local point which I reached anywhere, provided it was quiet, always seemed to me a sort of end of the world; and I remembered particularly feeling this, the only time when I had previously visited Chelsea, which was at that period of life.... I know not whether the corner I speak of remains as quiet as it was. I am afraid not; for steamboats have carried vicissitude into Chelsea, and Belgravia threatens it with her mighty advent. But to complete my sense of repose and distance, the house was of that old-fashioned sort which I have always loved best, familiar to the eyes of my parents, and associated with childhood. It had seats in the windows, a small third room on the first floor, of which I made a _sanctum_, into which no perturbation was to enter, except to calm itself with religious and cheerful thoughts (a room thus appropriated in a house appears to me an excellent thing;) and there were a few lime-trees in front, which in their due season diffused a fragrance.