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The Unlucky Day of the Fool's Month—High Street, West

Bromwich—My First Pedestrian Triumph—The Common English

Bracken—The Sense of Beauty.

I remember that in a fit of petulance at some childish misdemeanour, my mother once told me that I came into the world on the unlucky day of the fool's month. It was her picturesque way of saying that I was born on the thirteenth of April. I have often since had occasion to think that there was a wealth of prophetic wisdom in the phrase which neither she nor I suspected at the time.

I did the world the poor service of being born into it in the year 1847, in a house not now to be identified in the straggling High Street of West Bromwich, which in those days was a rather doleful hybrid of a place—neither town nor country. It is a compact business-like town now, and its spreading industries have defaced the lovely fringe of country which used to be around it.

Its great peculiarity to a thoughtful child lay in the fact that even at his small rate of progress he could pass in an hour from the clink, clink, clink on the anvils of the poor nailmakers, who worked in their own sordid back kitchens about the Ling or Virgin's End, to a rural retirement and quiet as complete as you may find to-day about Charlcote or Arden, or any other nook of the beautiful Shakespeare country. Since the great South Staffordshire coal fault was circumvented, nearly all the wide reaches of rural land which I remember are overgrown and defaced by labour. The diamond stream in which I used to bathe as a boy, where you could have counted the pebbles at the bottom, was running ink, and giving forth vile odours, when last I saw it. But fifty years ago, or more, there was the most exquisite green fringe to that fire-rotted, smoke-stained, dirty mantle of a Black Country. In the extreme stillness of the summer fields, and more especially, as I seem to remember, in a certain memorable hush which came when afternoon was shading into evening, you could hear the clank of pig-iron which was being loaded into the boats on the canal at Bromford, quite two miles away, and the thump of a steam hammer at Dawes's foundry.

I have begun many a child's ramble by a walk down Bromford Lane, to look in at the half-naked figures there sweating and toiling at the puddling furnaces, and have brought it to an end in the middle of the fairy ring on Stephenson's hills, only a couple of miles away, in what felt like the very heart of nature's solitude. Thus the old parish, which was not by any means an ideal place to be born and bred in, had its compensations for a holiday schoolboy who had Milton, and Klopstock, and Bunyan at his finger-ends, and had hell and the plains of heaven within an easy ramble from the paternal doorstep. But the special memory about which I set out to write was the one which immediately follows on the baby experience already recorded. It is almost as brief and isolated in itself; but I know by after association precisely where it took place, and I am almost persuaded that I know who was my companion.

I think it is Mr. Ruskin who speaks of our rural hedgerows as having been the pride and glory of our English fields, and the shame and disgrace of English husbandry. In the days I write of, they were veritable flower-gardens in their proper season. What with the great saucer-shaped elderberry blooms, and the pink and white dogroses, and the honeysuckle, and the white and purple foxgloves, and harebell and bluebell, and the starlike yellow-eyed daisy, there was an unending harvest for hand and eye. But the observation of all these things came later. Below the hedges the common English bracken grew, in occasional profusion, and it was a young growing spray of this plant which excited in my mind the very first sense of beauty I had ever known. It was curved in a gentle suggestion of an interrogation note. In colour, it was of a greenish-red and a very gentle yet luxuriant green. It was covered with a harmless baby down, and it was decorated at the curved tip with a crown-shaped scroll. There is really no need in the world to describe it, for one supposes that even the most inveterate Cockney has, at one time or another, seen the first tender offshoot of the commonest fern which grows in England.

From the time at which I achieved my first pedestrian triumph until I looked at this delight and wonder, I remember nothing. A year or two had intervened, and I was able to toddle about unaided; but, for anything I can actually recall, I might as well have been growing in my sleep. But I shall never forget it, and I have never experienced anything like it since. Whether I could at that time think in words at all, I do not know; but the beauty, the sense of the charm of the slender, tender thing went into my heart with an actual pang of pleasure, and my companion reproved me for crying about nothing. I don't remember crying; but I recall the question, and I know that nothing has ever since moved me in the same way.

I was about nineteen years of age, I think, when I first awoke to the fact that I had been born shortsighted. I bad had a year in the army, and when we were at the targets, or were out at judging-distance drill, I was aware that I did not see things at all as the musketry instructor represented them. But it happened one starlight night, after I had returned to civilian life, that a companion of little more than my own age, who had always worn spectacles in my remembrance of him, began to talk about the splendid brilliance of the heavens. I could discern a certain milky radiance, with here and there a dim twinkle in it, but no more. I borrowed my comrade's glasses, and I looked. The whole thing sprang at me, but rather with a sense of awe and wonder than of beauty; and even this much greater episode left the first impression of the child unchanged.

There is, or used to be, a little pleasure-steamer which starts at stated times for a voyage on Lake Wakatipu in New Zealand. For a while it passes along a gloomy channel which is bounded on either side by dark and lofty rocks of a forbidding aspect. This passage being cleared, the steamer bears away to the left, across the lake, and, beyond the jutting promontory near at hand, there lifts into sight on a fair day the first mountain of the Glenorchy Range. When I first saw it, the sky at the horizon was almost white; but the peaks of the distant mountains had, as Shakespeare says, a whiter hue than white, and through field-glasses its outlines could be perfectly distinguished. Then swung into sight a second mountain, and a third, and a fourth, and so on, in a progression which began to look endless. There is a form of delight which is very painful to endure, and I do not know that I ever experienced it more keenly than here. The huge snow-capped range gliding slowly up, “the way of grand, dull, Odyssean ghosts,” was impressive, and splendid, and majestic beyond anything I have known in a life which has been rich in travel; but if I want, at a fatigued or dispirited hour, to bathe my spirit clear in the memory of beautiful things seen, I go back, because I cannot help it, to that tender little fern-frond in a lane on the edge of the Black Country, which brought to me, first of all, the message that there is such a thing as beauty in the world.