other. It was funny, turning into one's berth, there in the middle of the Thames, and within hail of London Bridge; but one had done for a time with railways and telegraphs and daily papers, and three or four letter deliveries in a day, and all the mad hurry and drive which is, alas, getting to be so marked a characteristic of our English life; and with whole weeks before one for keen enjoyment, what was there to grumble at in being still off the Tower when we should have been at the Nore? "All right," is one of the first words a traveller should learn to say to himself.

Next morning, between seven and eight, the Sussex coast was not only visible, but all its familiar points distinctly recognizable, and I learned, not without a tax on that philosophical equanimity which I have just commended, that, owing to "bad coal," we were only going a trifle over four knots an hour, instead of nine or ten, and likely, therefore, to exactly double the proper length of the voyage. On making a strong appeal to the captain to put into Yarmouth for better coal, he said he would look through the bills of cargo, and see if there were any petroleum on board, as if so he would use it, or paraffin oil, or bacon! but no such happy chance of blowing us up was afforded; and as we soon discovered that the coal was, after all, good Welsh coal, and only needed different treatment, plenty of draught and constant stoking, we were ere long "all right" after all. When Lowestoft, the last of land, had faded out of sight, a Yarmouth trawler hailed us, and sent a boat to see if we wanted fish; and, after some bargaining, the steward agreed to give a bottle of rum and a pound of tobacco for a basket-ful. The vessel and the men would have delighted Mr. Hook, such specimens of our strong bold hardy sons of the waters, as England might be proud for the Continentals to look at. I have seldom seen such fellows.

Talking by the hour with a Norsk gentleman, who had spent a good deal of time in England, I was surprised at his acquaintance with our history and politics and literature. He was familiar with Paley's works, and Butler's "Analogy," and Maccaulay, and quoted them and similar books freely; but when he began upon our recent diplomatic doings, more especially with regard to Denmark and the Duchies, I confess I found it no easy matter to defend "Lord Yon Woossell," as he called our noble Foreign Secretary; and I must admit that to impartial listeners I am afraid he seemed to have the best of the argument. However, I did all my own honest convictions would allow in the way of extenuating where I could not justify "Lord Yon," and I verily believe, had his Lordship heard me, he would have made a very favourable minute of my name, and I might have

been recommended to Her Majesty, perhaps, for a pension, for having stoutly, and at great disadvantage, defended the honour of Old England. But, upon my word, that same sturdy Scandinavian, when he got on that theme, said some things about our recent English policy which brought the colour into my cheeks; and, warming with his subject, he went back to the days of our seizing the Danish ships, and enlisted the sympathies of bystanders by no end of, as I should have thought, forgotten grievances. However, he was happily wrong in some of his "facts," and I was not a little glad when, as a dutiful and loving son, I could clear the dear old mother from some of the reproaches heaped upon her. God bless her, she means well, and is not, in reality, that selfish, grasping, utterer of big words to the little, and deprecatory ones to the powerful, which the Continentals are not wholly without some colour of justification in considering her. But Mr. N. was a great admirer of Old England, after all, as are his countrymen generally, and praised us without stint, although he was certainly hard upon poor "Lord Yon," and gave us as a people credit for not always having justice done us abroad by our representatives.

It was fortunate for me that I am a good sailor, for the weather became such on the Friday night and Saturday that the captain, the mate, and myself had the saloon and table to ourselves. I have no sympathy with the exile of Patmos on one point, and quite hope and believe, indeed, that he is a little out in his "physical geography," when he so decidedly pronounces that "there shall be no more sea." But he is speaking figuratively. The sea to him was a dreary barrier, shutting out from him only too effectually so much that his loving heart yearned for. For my own part, if I should ever sink so low as to fall into the sin against which St. Paul warns the Colossians-" worshipping of angels"-one of the very first I would instal in my Pantheon would be "the angel of the waters;" and right pleasant is it to me to find how the many divinities of the twilight ages, so far as there is any substratum of the truly desirable in the idea of each, melt, as the Sun of Righteousness arises and ascends higher and higher in our human sky, into one glorious God and "Lord of all," to whom every knee shall bow, because, when He is known in very deed, the knee will bend instinctively and gladly. "We needs must love the highest when we see it." We can afford to dispense with the old mythology, fantastic, though often elegant, as it was, for the christian has a God of the winds, and a God of the sea, and a God of the groves and fountains, and of the high perpetual hills and everlasting mountains. And were I not conscious of the necessity for not allowing myself to be betrayed into digressions, I could exult to

ask, what meaneth this babblement of discordant voices that would make our true Lord less than even fabled Eolus or Neptune? I say "ought not Christ "-that Christ who was to chase before Him all the gods of the heathen-to have walked on the waters (as eye-witnesses say He did), their waves becoming an emerald pavement for his nature-honoured feet? "Ought He not," with more majestic ease than Greek or Roman ever ascribed to his ideal embodiment of power over the elements, to control the

"Luctantes ventos tempestatesque sonoras ?"

Verily, to my mind, the everlasting fitness of things ought to make the Christ of our four Gospels a joyous credibility. Thou art the King of glory, O Christ!

Can the reader pardon this spontaneous outbreak which I have not the heart to draw my pen through, and for which I am humbly willing to do any penance he may assign me? Only, on "the heap of great waters," delighting to remember Him who rideth thereon, "with his horses and his chariots of salvation," I suppose I thought it a venial offence (ie., if I thought at all about it, which admits of a query) just to suggest, in passing, that as He whom we worship is revealed to us under manifold phases, there may be an appropriateness in sometimes, according to our need or mood, localizing or particularizing Him; and so, for my own part, when feeling strange power swelling in me as I bound over the billows, ready to shout aloud for joy, I for a moment condense what little knowledge of God I have by His grace attained to, and bringing the everywhere-diffused rays of light to a temporary focus, worship Him in my heart as the God of the sea, and magnify Him who holdeth the waters in the hollow of his hand. "O, Lord God of hosts, who is a strong Lord like unto Thee? Thou rulest the raging of the sea; when the waves thereof arise, Thou stillest them."

But to return; so short a voyage was not likely to have much incident to record. Now and then we met with proofs of mishaps at sea that had made the heart of many of the living sad; spars of timber, planks, &c., and the captain said that sometimes the sea was literally covered with such tokens of disaster; timber-ships unseaworthy, or too heavily laden, often going down in this not seldom storm-tossed North Sea; a full cask floated by, and then a bullock. At noon on Saturday we drew the log, and found we had run 213 miles since the previous day at half-past ten, and were about halfway over. On Sunday morning, about half-past three, looking through my cabinwindow (I was on the wrong side of the vessel for seeing the Eastern sky), I was struck with the remarkable primrose hue

tinged with a faint green, of the cloudless sky; it was very light and gradually melted into the blue above. As the morning and day wore on there were no signs of Sunday, but the christian is sometimes independent of place and circumstance, and "'tis home where'er the heart is." Novalis, indeed, speaks too bold a word, when he says that man is the true shekinah; but taking the word cum grano, candidly and not carpingly, we may perhaps adopt it in our own sense, if not exactly in his. At all events, we have the highest authority for regarding the christian as a real temple. Still, I could not but often feel on this and some subsequent Sundays how much greater a blessing is the quiet English Day of Rest, with the opportunity of joining in public worship, than it is often considered when attendance at church or chapel comes as a matter of course, and almost seems "How amiable are Thy tabernacles, O, Lord of

monotonous.

Hosts!"

About ten, we sighted land, and just as the dear ones at home were beginning to join in solemn prayer and chant, I was invited. into the saloon "to drink a health to old Norway," by a resident in Christiania, returning home from a trip to England; and so, though my thoughts were otherwhere, I joined the company for a few minutes, and we clinked glasses to "Gamle Norge!" Let me say here that in Norsk, as in German, final e is never mute, and the g in the Norge, has much the sound of y. Gamle Norge is old Norway; and to my mind a pleasant thing it is for the natives of some countries (I say some, for not the people of all lands feel the impulse to use the epithet, and it might be worth while to notice who, and to ask why) to prefix so fondly this term of tender veneration that looks to a long past. I think it a positive loss when, either from circumstances or want of inward impulse, the people of a country do not use it. How much our Transatlantic cousins lose in not having as yet a history of centuries, and in not being able to speak and sing of "Old America." But the Norwegians are proud of the deeds of their long-ago forefathers, and say "Old Norway," as fondly as we say "Old England." And it is something for us to have got rid of the new-fangled nonsensical coxcombry that a few years since was fain to flaunt before us "Young England," instead of the precious time honoured watchword that shall never die. Thanks to Wordsworth for his timely rebuke

"YOUNG ENGLAND !-What is then become of Old,
Of dear old England? Think they she is dead,
Dead to the very name? Presumption fed

On empty air! That name will keep its hold
In the true filial bosom's inmost fold
For ever."

The Norwegian coast at first somewhat reminded me of the appearance of the Land's End as it opens when approaching from the Scilly Isles, but on nearing it the resemblance ceased. The steamer was to touch at Christiansand, which is situate at the extremity of a Fjord (the j has the sound of y, as in hallelujah) or arm of the sea; and, lying low, and the channel winding its way through various rocks, it does not become visible till you are within a few minutes' sail of it. The first impressions of the inland coast scenery, as seen from the deck, were very pleasant; although, had I been in the mood for yielding to disappointment, because it was not exactly what I had expected, I might, with one of my fellow passengers, have refused the milder enjoyment that was offered in the absence of the more sublime.

The low, shelving, island rocks on our starboard, as we steamed up the winding channel, were not merely without an atom of vegetation, but were bare with a savage bareness all their own; every one of them looking as if to speak of the storms of a thousand winters having swept over them would be to say but little; while, on the contrary, the western coast of the channel gave as we passed a long succession of charming landscapes, quite new to my English eye, but of a kind that the pencil alone could not render. For a large part of the charm lay rather in the contrasts and harmonies of colour than in form, although indeed there was no want of variety in this. Brown rocks and grey, of every possible shade, with greens of all imaginable and unimaginable tints, and amply justifying the most extravagant of our pre-Raphaelite vagaries; little plots of vivid grass shone on by the sun, and tiny bits of corn, some in sunshine, some in shade, on all practicable ledges, with firs, that the eye had not yet grown weary of, growing everywhere, singly, or in groups, or in large masses, relieved by the silver birch; with the forest growth of ages, near, and in the middle ground, and in the distance-green in the foreground, dark and gloomy in the impenetrable forest of the mountains behind, though trying to put on the proper distance blue of the horizon-with all sorts of irregularity of ground everywhere, while here and there interspersed, sometimes partially concealed, were wooden huts, with their red roofs, and snug little dwellings, each on its own plot of rock and soil, and now and then a pretty or picturesque "villa," as a corresponding structure at home would be called, with rocks and trees and patches of grass or corn above, around, below them. The artist might soon fill his portfolio with effective sketches easily washed in, charming idyllic pictures full of value to the pure mind and heart. The Norwegian sailors were pleased at my admiration, while one or two fellow-passengers wondered what there was to admire, and my new Christiania friends were