Europe -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
But my letter is getting too long for your columns, so I can only beg
all your readers to seize the first chance of visiting the Tyrol.
I shall be surprised if they do not come away with much the same
impressions as I have. It is a glad land, above all that I have ever
seen--a land in which a psalm of joy and thankfulness seems to be rising
to heaven from every mountain top and valley, and, mingled with and
beneath it, the solemn low note of a people “breathing thoughtful
breath”--an accompaniment without which there is no true joy possible
in our world, without which all attempt at it rings in the startled
ear like the laugh of a madman. Those words of the old middle-age hymn
seemed to be singing in my ears all through the Tyrol:--
Fac me vere tecum flere,
Crucitixo condolere,
Donee ego vixcro.
I shall never find a country in which it will do one more good to
travel.
Vienna, 10th September 1862.
The stage Englishman in foreign countries must be always an object of
interest to his countrymen. He is a decidedly popular institution
in Germany, not the least like the Dundreary type, or the sort of
top-booted half fool, half miscreant, one sees at a minor theatre in
Paris. The latest Englishmen on the boards of the summer theatres here
are a Lord Mixpickl, and his man Jack, but the most popular, and those
which appear to be regarded in fatherland as the real thing, are the
Englishmen in a piece called “The Four Sailors.” It opens with a
yawning chorus. Four young Englishmen are discovered sitting at a German
watering-place, reading copies of the _Times_ and _Post_, and yawning
fearfully. The chorus done, one says, “The funds are at 84.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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