PASSAGES OF A WORKING LIFE. CHAPTER I. HE greater portion of my Second Epoch was written at Ventnor, in the Isle of Wight. I had spent the winter there with my family, and quitted it when the spring seemed at once passing into summer, and there was such an outburst of leaf and blossom as I had rarely witnessed in the early days of May. What a region of beauty is the Undercliff in all seasons. Winter rarely touches it with an icy finger. When " yellow leaves, or none, or few" hang upon the boughs that mingle with fallen crags, their bareness is hidden by the glossy ivy. In March it is a land of evergreens; in June a land of "flowers of all hues." It is scarcely a place in which to pass a working life;" but it is a place in which it is good to look back upon the turmoil of such a lifeits vain cares, its disappointed hopes,-and to see what was once deemed the highest good fading into nothingness, and the instant evil melting into a twilight in which good and evil wear the same passionless and almost shapeless features. We unwillingly left the Undercliff, which had long been to me a spot sacred to friendship, when the friend was a perennial source of delight to all who had the happiness to know him. It has become to me even more sacred, now that he lies in the most beautiful of churchyards, that of his long-loved Bonchurch. We moved for the summer to a very different scene, but one, to my mind, equally attractive. `I commence the story of my Third Epoch on the banks of the Thames, above Kingston. We are the tenants of an artist, whose spacious and quaint studio where I write is fitted by its seclusion for calling up the most abstracted memories of the Past. The river flows rapidly beneath my window, under the shadow of lofty elms which have flourished for a century, and by gay villas which proclaim the changes which have marked the era of rapid communication. And yet the Present is constantly in view, in the continuous stream of human life, which appears to move on as if it were always "a sunshine holiday." In the morning and afternoon happy parties in van or cart are on their way to Hampton Court. As the sun is westering, boat after boat comes forth, some laden with fair ones, not perhaps so fine and fashionable as in the days when "Belinda smiled;" some bearing the solitary youth in his outrigger, who is training for the contest of a regatta; and, now and then, the beautiful eight-oar, rushing up the stream at a wondrous rate, attests the worth of one of the pursuits of Eton and Oxford. Very remarkable are the changed aspects of the Londoners' river from Chelsea to Hampton. Rarely do I behold the team of a dozen horses toiling along the towing-path on the shore opposite my window. Cargoes of heavy goods travel by other modes of conveyance. Railroads carry the chief produce of the country to the |