Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442

When these facts were first mentioned to us, we looked with some curiosity at the machine from which we had just stepped out; and there we found an illustration of them not highly flattering to our self-esteem. Knees, hips, shoulders, ears, all were so ill-assorted, that it seemed as if Nature had been actually trying her 'prentice hand upon our peculiar self. It was in vain to bethink ourselves of the physical eccentricities of the distinguished men of other times:

'Ammon's great son one shoulder had too high;Such Ovid's nose, and, sir, you have an eye!'—

we might have gone through tho whole inventory of the figure, and concluded the quotation:

'Go on, obliging creatures, make me seeAll that disgraced my betters met in me.Say, for my comfort, languishing in bed,Just so immortal Maro held his head;And when I die, be sure you let me know—Great Homer died three thousand years ago!'

What we had seen, however, was only the length of the figure; but we were informed by our philosophic tailor, that the limbs, &c., are likewise irregularly placed as regards breadth. The trunk of the body is of various shapes, which he distinguishes as the oval, the circular, and the flat. The first has the arms placed in the middle; in the second, they are more towards the back, and relatively long; and in the third, more towards the front, and relatively short. The length of the forearm should be the length of the lower part of the leg, and if either longer or shorter, the difference appears in the walk. If shorter, the walk is a kind of waddle, the elbows inclining outwards; if longer, it is distinguished by a swinging motion, as if the person carried weights in his hands. If the circumference of the body, measured with an inch-tape just below the shoulders, be smaller than the circumference of the hips, the person will rock in walking, and plant his feet heavily upon the ground. If greater, so that the chief weight is above the limbs, the step will be light, as is familiarly seen in corpulent men, whose delicate mode of walking we witness with ever-recurring surprise. If the shoulders slope downwards, with the spine bending inwards, the individual 'cannot throw a stone, or handle firearms with dexterity.' When inclined forwards, and well relieved from the body, he may be a proficient in these exercises. A peculiarity in walking is given by the size of the head and neck being out of proportion; and an instance is mentioned of a man being discharged from the army, on account of his conformation rendering it impossible for him to keep his head steady.

All these are curious and suggestive particulars. It is customary to refer awkwardness of manner to bad habit, and such diseases as consumption either to imprudence or hereditary taint; but it may be doubted whether taints are not mainly the result of original conformation. Habit and imprudence may doubtless aggravate the evil, just as exercise may enlarge a member of the body; but it is nature which sows the seeds of decay in her own productions. Physically, the child is a copy of the parents, even to their peculiarities of gait; and these peculiarities would seem to depend on the correct or incorrect balance of the members of the body. When the conformation is of a kind which interferes with the play of the lungs, the same transmission of course takes place, and consumption may be the fatal inheritance. If the arrangement of the parts were perfect, it may be doubted—for symmetry is the basis of health as well as beauty—whether we should ever hear of such a thing as 'taint in the blood.' If this theory were to gain ground, it would simplify much the practice of medicine; for the disease would stand in visible and tangible presence before the eyes, and the employment of inventions, to counteract and finally conquer the eccentricities of nature, would be governed by science, and thus relieved from the suspicion of quackery, which at present more or less attaches to it. To pursue these speculations, however, would lead us too far; and before concluding, we must find room for a few more of our practical philosopher's observations.

All good mechanics, it seems, have large hands and thick and short fingers; which is pretty nearly the conclusion arrived at by D'Arpentigny in La Chirognomonie, although the captain adds, that the hands must be en spatule—that is to say, with the end of the fingers enlarged in the form of a spatula. The hand is generally the same breadth as the foot: a fact recognised by the country people, who, when buying their shoes at fairs—which were the usual mart—might have been seen thrusting in their hand to try the breadth, when they had ascertained that the length was suitable. A short foot gives a mincing walk, while a long one requires the person to bring his body aplomb with the foot before taking the step, which thus resembles a stride. Good dancers have the limbs short as compared with the body, which has thus the necessary power over them; but if too short, there is a deficiency of dexterity in the management of the feet.

In conclusion, it will be seen, we think, that there is much to be learned even in the business of the shears. There is no trade whatever which will not afford materials for thought to an intelligent man, and thus enlarge the mind and elevate the character.

THE NIGHTINGALE:

A MUSICAL QUESTION

Is the song of the nightingale mirthful or melancholy? is a question that has been discussed so often, that anything new on the subject might be considered superfluous, were it not that the very fact of the discussion is in itself a curiosity worthy of attention. The note in dispute was heard with equal distinctness by Homer and Wordsworth; and indeed there are few poets of any age or country who have not, at one time or other in their lives, had the testimony of their own ears as to its character. Whence, then, this difference of opinion? Listen to Thomson's unqualified assertion, given with the seriousness of an affidavit:

——'all abandoned to despair, she singsHer sorrows through the night, and on the boughSole sitting still at every dying fallTakes up again her lamentable strainOf winding wo; till wide around the woodsSigh to her song and with her wail resound.'

Then Homer in the Odyssey, through Pope's paraphrase:

'Sad Philomel, in bowery shades unseen,To vernal airs attunes her varied strains.'

Virgil, as rendered by Dryden:

——'she supplies the night with mournful strainsAnd melancholy music fills the plains.'

Milton, too:

——'Philomel will deign a songIn her sweetest, saddest plight,Smoothing the rugged brow of night,While Cynthia checks her dragon yokeGently o'er the accustom'd oak:Sweet bird, that shun'st the noise of folly—Most musical, most melancholy.'

And again in Comus:

——'the love-lorn nightingaleNightly to thee her sad song mourneth well.'

And Shakspeare makes his poor banished Valentine congratulate himself, that in the forest he can

——'to the nightingale's complaining noteTune his distresses and record his wo.

We might go on much longer in this strain. We might give, likewise, the mythological cause assigned for the imputed melancholy, and add that some, not content with this, represent the bird as leaning its breast against a thorn—

'To aggravate the inward grief,Which makes its music so forlorn.'

But we would rather pause to admit candidly, that two of the above witnesses might be challenged—Virgil and Thomson; who indeed should be counted but as one, for the author of the Seasons, in the lines quoted, has translated, though not so closely as Dryden, from the Georgics of the Latin poet. If you will read the passage—it matters not whether in Virgil, Dryden, or Thomson—you will perceive that it is a special occurrence that is spoken of: no statement whatever is made as to the character of the nightingale's ordinary song. Thomson, in the course of his humane and touching protest against the barbarous art: 'through which birds are

—– by tyrant manInhuman caught, and in the narrow cageFrom liberty confined, and boundless air,'

represents the nightingale's misery when thus bereaved. This portion of the lines shall stand entire; none, we are sure, would wish us further to mangle the passage:

'But chief, let not the nightingale lamentHer ruined care, too delicately framedTo brook the harsh confinement of the cage.Oft, when returning with her loaded bill,The astonished mother finds a vacant nest,By the rude hands of unrelenting clownsRobbed: to the ground the vain provision falls.Her pinions ruffle, and low drooping, scarceCan bear the mourner to the poplar shade;Where all abandoned to despair, she singsHer sorrows through the night.'

It will at once be seen that this description relates to an exceptional condition, and we have yet to seek what character Virgil and Thomson would give to the ordinary song of this paradoxical musician. For the Roman, we do not know that any passage exists in his works which can help us to a conclusion; but Thomson's testimony must undoubtedly be ranged on the contra side, as appears from the following lines in his Agamemnon:

'Ah, far unlike the nightingale! she singsUnceasing through the balmy nights of May—She sings from love and joy.'

In the passage from his Spring, which we have given, we cannot but fancy that the poet endeavoured—if we may so say—to effect a compromise between the opinion which, through the influence of classical poetry, generally prevailed as to the character of the bird's music, and the opposing convictions which his own senses had forced upon him. It was desirable to describe its strains according to the popular fancy, and therefore he borrowed from Virgil such a description of the bird's sorrow as under the assumed circumstances did no violence to his own judgment.

Thomson is not the only poet in whom we fancy we detect some such attempt at compromise. It appears to us that Villega, the Anacreon of Spain, in the following little poem, which we give in Mr Wiffen's translation, adopted, with a similar object, this idea of the nightingale robbed of her young. The truthful and somewhat minute description in the song, however, represents the bird's ordinary performance, and but ill suits the circumstances under which it is supposed to be uttered. The failure on the part of the poet may be ascribed to his secret conviction, that the nightingale's was a cheerful melody; and his labouring against that conviction to the necessity he felt himself under of following his classical masters.

'I have seen a nightingaleOn a sprig of thyme bewail,Seeing the dear nest that wasHers alone, borne off, alas!By a labourer: I heard,For this outrage, the poor birdSay a thousand mournful thingsTo the wind, which on its wingsFrom her to the guardian skyBore her melancholy cry—Bore her tender tears. She spakeAs if her fond heart would break.One while in a sad, sweet note,Gurgled from her straining throat,She enforced her piteous tale,Mournful prayer and plaintive wail;One while with the shrill dispute,Quite o'er-wearied, she was mute;Then afresh, for her dear brood,Her harmonious shrieks renewed;Now she winged it round and round,Now she skimmed along the ground;Now from bough to bough in hasteThe delighted robber chased;And alighting in his path,Seemed to say, 'twixt grief and wrath:"Give me back, fierce rustic rude!Give me back my pretty brood!"And I saw the rustic stillAnswer: "That I never will!"'

Independently of the untruthfulness of which a naturalist would complain in this description—for no birds under such circumstances of distress sing, but merely repeat each its own peculiar piercing cry, never at any other time heard, and which cannot be mistaken—there is a palpable effort of ingenuity discoverable in the representation, which seems to tell us that the writer was making up a story, rather than uttering his own belief. It may even be doubted whether Virgil himself, who seems first to have invented this fancy, and behind whose broad mantle later poets have sheltered themselves, may not have felt an inclination to depart from the Greek opinion of Philomel's ditty. Why otherwise did he not simply and at once—as his masters Homer and Theocritus had done before him—describe her notes as mournful, instead of casting about for some cause that might excuse him for giving them that character? But however this may be, we cannot conceal from ourselves, that some stubborn passages still remain in the poets, proclaiming that there are men, and those among the greatest and most tasteful, to whose fancy the voice of the nightingale has sounded full of wo.

Homer must be counted of this number—unless we think with Fox, in the preface to his History of Lord Holland, that it is only as to her wakefulness Penelope is compared to the night singing-bird; and so must Milton (for although Coleridge has satisfactorily dealt with the passage in Il Penseroso, the line of the Lady's song in Comus remains still); and Shakspeare himself, who could scarcely be influenced, as Milton might very possibly be, by the opinions of the Grecian poets.

It is a strange contest we are here considering. Which of us would for a moment doubt our ability to decide in a dispute as to the liveliness or sadness of any given melody?—yet here we see the greatest poets, the favoured children of nature, utterly at variance on a point concerning which we should have expected to find even the most ordinary minds able to decide.

The question becomes more involved from the fact, that some writers take both sides; for instance, Chiobrera in Aleippo: the nightingale

'Unwearied still reiterates her lays,Jocund or sad, delightful to the ear;'

and Hartley Coleridge, in the following beautiful song, which we transcribe the more readily because it has not long been published, and may be new to many of our readers:

''Tis sweet to hear the merry lark,That bids a blithe good-morrow;But sweeter to hark in the twinkling darkTo the soothing song of sorrow.Oh, nightingale! what doth she ail?And is she sad or jolly?For ne'er on earth was sound of mirthSo like to melancholy.The merry lark he soars on high,No worldly thought o'ertakes him;He sings aloud to the clear blue sky,And the daylight that awakes him.As sweet a lay, as loud, as gay,The nightingale is trilling;With feeling bliss, no less than hisHer little heart is thrilling.Yet ever and anon a sighPeers through her lavish mirth;For the lark's bold song is of the sky,And hers is of the earth.By night and day she tunes her lay,To drive away all sorrow;For bliss, alas! to-night may pass,And wo may come to-morrow.'

We must now cite one or two of the many passages which represent the nightingale's as an absolutely cheerful song. We fear we cannot insist so much as Fox is disposed to do, on the evidence of Chaucer, who continually styles the nightingale's a merry note, because it is evident that in his day the word had a somewhat different meaning from that which it at present conveys. For example, the poet calls the organ 'merry.' Nor dare we lay stress upon the instance which Cary cites—in a note to his Purgatory—of a 'neglected poet,' Vallans, who in his Tale of Two Swannes ranks the 'merrie nightingale among the cheerful birds,' because we do not know whether, even at the time when Vallans wrote—the book was published, it seems, in 1590—'merrie' had come to bear its present signification.

We shall, however, find a witness among the writers of his period in Gawain Douglas, who died Bishop of Dunkeld in 1522. He, in a prologue to one of his Æneids, applies not only the word 'merry' to our bird, but one of less questionable signification—'mirthful.' If we come down to more modern times, we shall find Wordsworth, who seems above all others, except Burns, to have had a catholic ear for the whole multitude of natural sounds, not only refusing the character of melancholy to the nightingale's song, but placing it below the stock-dove's, because it is deficient in the pensiveness and seriousness which mark the note of the latter.

However, of all testimonies which can be brought on this side of the question, the strongest is that of Coleridge. No other has so accurately described the song itself; moreover, he alone has entered the lists avowedly as an antagonist, and confessing in so many words to the existence of an opinion opposite to his own.

'And hark! the nightingale begins its song,"Most musical, most melancholy" bird.A melancholy bird? oh, idle thought!2In nature there is nothing melancholy.But some night-wandering man, whose heart was piercedWith the resemblance of a grievous wrong,Or slow distemper, or neglected love,First named these notes a melancholy strain:And youths and maidens most poetical,Who lose the deepening twilight of the springIn ball-rooms and hot theatres, they still,Full of meek sympathy, must heave their sighsO'er Philomela's pity-pleading strains.My friend, and thou, our sister! we have learntA different love: we may not thus profaneNature's sweet voices, always full of loveAnd joyance! 'Tis the merry nightingaleThat crowds and hurries and precipitatesWith fast-thick warble his delicious notes,As he were fearful that an April nightWould be too short for him to utter forthHis love-chant and disburden his full soulOf all its music!'

Little now remains to be said. We have laid before the reader specimens of the two contending opinions, as well as of that which is set up as a golden mean between them; and he has but to put down our pages, and to walk forth—provided he does not live too far north, or in some smoke-poisoned town—to judge for himself as to the true character of the strains. Small risk, we think, would there be in pronouncing on which side his verdict would be given! Well do we remember the night when we first heard this sweet bird: how we listened and refused to believe—for we were young, and our idea had of course been that his song was a melancholy one—that those madly hilarious sounds could come from the mournful nightingale. Wordsworth attempts thus to account for the delusion under which the older poets laboured on this subject:

'Fancy, who leads the pastimes of the glad,Full oft is pleased a wayward dart to throw,Sending sad shadows after things not sad,Peopling the harmless fields with sighs of wo.Beneath her sway, a simple forest cryBecomes an echo of man's misery.What wonder? at her bidding ancient laysSteeped in dire grief the voice of Philomel,And that blithe messenger of summer days,The swallow, twittered, subject to like spell.'

It is curious that the people who first fixed the stigma of melancholy upon our bird—the Greeks, or at least the Athenians, and it is of them we speak—were perhaps the very gayest people that ever danced upon the earth—absolute Frenchmen. The very sprightliness of their temper, however, by the universally prevailing law of contrast, may have induced in them a fondness for sad and doleful legends; and we confess, for our own part, that while we from our hearts admire the poetical beauty and elegance of their various fables, we do not a little disrelish the constant vein of melancholy which pervades them all. Not the least sad of their fictions is that which relates to the nightingale; a story that has found its way—and even more universally the opinion of the bird's music which it implied—amongst all the nations whom Greece has instructed and civilised.

But we have yet another reply to the question, 'Why do most people call the nightingale's a melancholy song?' It is heard by night, 'whilst our spirits are attentive,' and the solemn gloom of the hour influences the judgment of the ear; for another false impression, which like the monster Error of Spenser, has bred a thousand young ones as ill-favoured as herself, ascribes melancholy to night. There is no good reason why we should think thus of the night, still less that the impression should influence our judgment in other matters; and we owe no small thanks to those who have endeavoured to reclaim to their proper uses these misdirected associations, and to teach, that

'In nature there is nothing melancholy;'

but on the contrary,

'Healing her wandering and distempered child,She pours around her softest influences,Her sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets,Her melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,Till he relent, and can no more endureTo be a jarring and a dissonant thingAmid the general dance and harmony;But, bursting into tears, wins back his way,His angry spirit healed and harmonisedBy the benignant touch of love and beauty.'

THE TEA-COUNTRIES OF CHINA

About four years ago, Mr Fortune, author of Three Years' Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China, was deputed by the East India Company to proceed to China for the purpose of obtaining the finest varieties of the tea-plant, as well as native manufacturers and implements, for the government tea-plantations in the Himalaya. Being acquainted with the Chinese language, and adopting the Chinese costume, he penetrated into districts unvisited before by Europeans—excepting, perhaps, the Catholic missionaries—exciting no further curiosity as to his person or pedigree, than what was due to a stranger from one of the provinces beyond the great wall. His principal journeys were to Sung-lo, the great green-tea district, and to the Bohea Mountains, the great black-tea district; besides a flying visit to Kingtang, or Silver Island, in the Chusan archipelago. The narrative, which he has since published,3 manifests a good faculty for observation; but travelling as privately as possible, he saw little but the exterior aspects of the country, the appearance of which he describes very graphically. As a botanist, he had a keen eye for everything which promised to enlarge our knowledge of the Chinese flora, and discovered many useful and ornamental trees and shrubs, some of which, such as the funereal cypress, will one day produce a striking and beautiful effect in our English landscape, and in our cemeteries. Of social and political information relative to the Celestial Empire, the book is quite barren; and we do not know that there is anything in it which will be so acceptable to the reader, as fresh and reliable information about his favourite beverage. To this, therefore, our attention will be confined.

The plant in cultivation about Canton, from which the Canton teas are made, is known to botanists as the Thea bohea; while the more northern variety, found in the green-tea country, has been called Thea viridis. The first appears to have been named upon the supposition, that all the black teas of the Bohea Mountains were obtained from this species; and the second was called viridis, because it furnished the green teas of commerce. These names seem to have misled the public; and hence many persons, until a few years ago, firmly believed that black tea could be made only from Thea bohea, and green tea only from Thea viridis. In his Wanderings in China, published in 1846, Mr Fortune had stated that both teas could be made from either plant, and that the difference in their appearance depended upon manipulation, and upon that only. But the objection was made, that although he had been in many of the tea-districts near the coast, he had not seen those greater ones inland which furnish the teas of commerce. Since that time, however, he has visited them, without seeing reason to alter his statements. The two kinds of tea, indeed, are rarely made in the same district; but this is a matter of convenience. Districts which formerly were famous for black teas, now produce nothing but green. At Canton, green and black teas are made from the Thea bohea at the pleasure of the manufacturer, and according to demand. When the plants arrive from the farms fresh and cool, they dry of a bright-green colour; but if they are delayed in their transit, or remain in a confined state for too long a period, they become heated, from a species of spontaneous fermentation; and when loosened and spread open, emit vapours, and are sensibly warm to the hand. When such plants are dried, the whole of the green colour is found to have been destroyed, and a red-brown, and sometimes a blackish-brown result is obtained. 'I had also noticed,' says Mr Warrington, in a paper read by him before the Chemical Society, 'that a clear infusion of such leaves, evaporated carefully to dryness, was not all undissolved by water, but left a quantity of brown oxidised extractive matter, to which the denomination apothem has been applied by some chemists; a similar result is obtained by the evaporation of an infusion of black tea. The same action takes place by the exposure of the infusions of many vegetable substances to the oxidising influence of the atmosphere; they become darkened on the surface, and this gradually spreads through the solution, and on evaporation, the same oxidised extractive matter will remain insoluble in water. Again, I had found that the green teas, when wetted and redried, with exposure to the air, were nearly as dark in colour as the ordinary black teas. From these observations, therefore, I was induced to believe, that the peculiar characters and chemical differences which distinguish black tea from green, were to be attributed to a species of heating or fermentation, accompanied with oxidation by exposure to the air, and not to its being submitted to a higher temperature in the process of drying, as had been generally concluded. My opinion was partly confirmed by ascertaining from parties conversant with the Chinese manufacture, that the leaves for the black teas were always allowed to remain exposed to the air in mass for some time before they were roasted.'