560 PRÆTERITA-III

The modern artificial ideal being, on the contrary, expressed by the manner of stamp or tap, as in the Laureate’s line-

“She tapped her tiny silken-sandalled foot.”¹

From which type the way is short, and has since been traversed quickly, to the conditions of patten, clog, golosh, and high-heeled bottines, with the real back of the foot thrown behind the ankle like a negress’s, which have distressed alike, and disgraced, all feminine motion for the last quarter of a century,-the slight harebell having little chance enough of raising its head,² once well under the hoofs of our proud maidenhood, decorate with dead robins, transfixed humming-birds, and hot-house flowers,-for its “Wedding March by Mendelssohn.” To think that there is not enough love or praise in all Europe and America to invent one other tune for the poor things to strut to!

85. I draw back to my own home, twenty years ago, permitted to thank Heaven once more for the peace, and hope, and loveliness of it, and the Elysian walks with Joanie, and Paradisiacal with Rosie, under the peach-blossom branches by the little glittering stream which I had paved with crystal for them.³ I had built behind the highest cluster of laurels a reservoir, from which, on sunny afternoons, I could let a quite rippling film of water run for a couple of hours down behind the hayfield, where the grass in spring still grew fresh and deep. There used to be always a corncrake or two in it. Twilight after twilight I have hunted that bird, and never once got glimpse of it: the voice was always at the other side of the field, or in the inscrutable air or earth. And the little stream had its falls, and pools, and imaginary lakes. Here and there it laid for itself lines of graceful sand; there and here it lost itself under beads of chalcedony. It wasn’t the Liffey,

¹ [The Princess, Prologue, 149.]

² [Scott, Lady of the Lake, i. 18: quoted also in Sesame and Lilies, § 94 (Vol. XVIII. p. 142).]

³ [See above, p. 317.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]