Читать книгу An Australian Ramble; Or, A Summer in Australia онлайн

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But let me leave the bishop alone, and turn to things of a more worldly character. Poor Edgar Poe writes: ‘There are four conditions of happiness in life, and one of them is life in the open air.’ In this respect we are especially fortunate. We are no sooner out of the Devonshire mists than we are in the Bay of Biscay, calm as an infant on its mother’s breast. We live in the open air. Passed Cape Finisterre after dark on Monday night, and steamed pleasantly down the Spanish coast, having an especially fine view of Cintra and the mouth of the Tagus. All along the coast were dotted, amongst the foliage, white villages, and towns, and villas, all basking in the summer sun. Heroic memories come to us as we pass over the seas where the Captain was lost, in consequence, it is to be feared, of defective seamanship, with her crew of picked men and some of our finest lads of noble birth. All along that coast, when Old England was fighting for pre-eminence and power, and on those far-away hills has the noise of battle rolled, and not in vain, for the struggle that ended with Waterloo placed England in the first rank among the nations of the earth. From Tilbury’s ancient fort to Gibraltar we are reminded how England, with her wooden walls and hardy sons, proudly swept the seas, and was a terror to the despots and a deliverer of the slave. Plymouth especially calls up a host of glorious names, as we think of Drake, and Hawkins, and Frobisher, and the Pilgrim Fathers. It was from Plymouth that Cook and Vancouver sailed, to give us New South Wales in the East and British Columbia in the West. As soon as we cross the Bay of Biscay we think of Corunna and Sir John Moore. Afar off are the heights of Torres Vedras, celebrated in the Peninsular War. Cape St. Vincent, a bluff 260 feet high, having a convent, on which is the lighthouse, reminds us of the brilliant victory won by Sir John Jervis, with Nelson and Collingwood fighting under his flag; and in a little while we are at Trafalgar, to which sailors still look as the greatest sea fight in the history of our land, and as the one which saved our national existence. And we step on shore at Gibraltar, which rises out of the water, with its endless rows of barracks and its few scattered villas, and make our way to the lightning-struck tower known as O’Hara’s Folly—the O’Hara who was the friend of Johnson, and who ought to have married either Fanny Burney or Hannah More.