Hush! hush! 'Tis the voice of the sea to the land, As it breaks on the desolate strand, With a chime to the strenuous wave of life That throbs in the quivering sand.
Hush! hush! Each requiem tone as it dies, With a soul that is parting, sighs; For the tide rolls back from the pulseless clay As the foam in the tempest flies.
Hush! hush! O throb of the restless sea! All hearts are attuned to thee-- All pulses beat with thine ebb and flow To the rhyme of Eternity!
I allude to the British soldier, more especially, as I lately observed and admired him at Aldershot, where, just now, he appears to particular advantage; but at any time during the past twelvemonth--since England and Russia have stood glaring at each other across the prostrate body of the expiring yet reviving Turk--this actually ornamental and potentially useful personage has been picturesquely, agreeably conspicuous. I say "agreeably," speaking from my own humble point of view, because I confess to a lively admiration of the military class. I exclaim, cordially, with Offenbach's Grand Duchess, "Ah, oui, j'aime les militaires!" Mr. Ruskin has said somewhere, very naturally, that he could never resign himself to living in a country in which, as in the United States, there should be no old castles. Putting aside the old castles, I should say, like Mr. Ruskin, that life loses a certain indispensable charm in a country destitute of an apparent standing army. Certainly, the army may be too apparent, too importunate, too terrible a burden to the state and to the conscience of the philosophic observer. This is the case, without a doubt, just now in the bristling empires of the Continent. In Germany and France, in Russia and Italy, there are many more soldiers than are needed to make the taxpayer thrifty or the lover of the picturesque happy. The huge armaments of continental Europe are an oppressive and sinister spectacle, and I have rarely derived a high order of entertainment from the sight of even the largest masses of homesick conscripts. The _chair à canon_--the cannon-meat--as they aptly term it in French, has always seemed to me dumbly, appealingly conscious of its destiny. I have seen it in course of preparation--seen it salted and dressed and packed and labelled, as it were, for consumption. In that marvellous France, indeed, which bears all burdens lightly, and whose good spirits and absence of the tragic _pose_ alone prevent us from calling her constantly heroic, the army scarcely seems to be the heavy charge that it must be in fact. The little red-legged soldiers, always present and always moving, are as thick as the field-flowers in an abundant harvest, and amid the general brightness and mobility of French life they strike one at times simply as cheerful tokens of the national exuberance and fecundity. But in Germany and Italy the national levies impart a lopsided aspect to society: they seem to drag it under water. They hang like a millstone round its neck, so that it can't move: it has to sit still, looking wistfully at the long, forward road which it is unable to measure.