The Express.
London, England, 1862-01-23 00:00:00

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LONDON, THURSDAY, JAN. 23.

Wurraa is come at last, my good easy people,
as they sit at the snug fireside, listening sleepily
to the fall of the feathery =weak.' on the spell-
bound earth. Winter is most welcome when its
gimp is keenest and its face meat desolate, to those
who in warm rooms, brightened with good com-
pany and plentiful cheer, wonder what there is in
life so precious to the pauper and the outcast that
they should not be content to lie down and accept
the last repose of rich and poor alike ! It is at
such a season that the most subtle social self-
indulgenes enjoys the lazury of public almsgiving,
and the gratification of feeding the hungry and
clothing the naked by subscription; making misery,
like church-going. a condiment to respectability,
and the sufferings that " wretches feel " a pun-
gent satisfaction to the pionsopalence that relieves
them at • respectful dietetics. It is • season of
rare physical enjoyment to nerves that are braced
by the crisposiog frost, and to rich blood that
glows in the eager air. It is a season of rare
moral enjoyment to well-to-do benevolence,
that out of the abundance of its pity and
its pockets signs its cheques for " institutions."
Presently a thaw comes, and the poignant sense
of contrast which prompted the indifferent to pity,
and lent an exquisite pang to the comforts of the
rich, becomes relaxed and torpid agaiu. At such
a moment we are tempted to ask • question.
Does Society ever seriously pause to think what
real winter is for hundreds and thousands of its
fellow creatures T No doubt it does. Listen to
the voices from the pulpits, look at those columns
of subscription lots which pompous charity de-
ploys. Even as tales of shipwrecks, of battles and
adventures by land and sea, ere favourite winter
reading for the young ; so among the heads of
families, the records of poverty and headship point
the moral of the well-furnished table and the
well heaped hearth. Romance and reality, how-
ever, are two very different things, though both be-
come conventional. The realities of the labourer's
lot, and of the workman's hard condition, are the
subject-matter of social science, of administra-
tive reports, of blue books, lectures, institutions,
public speeches. Some years ago it was the
fashion to make novels a vehicle for a sort of
sentimental socialism. Now another epoch
has come ; • military epoch ; and, as in
the good old times, romantic heroism now
wean some sort of uniform—a convict's, if no
better can be vt—and is surrounded with the
halo of crime if not of glory. The most modern
hero, to be interesting, must have wielded the
sword or the cutlass., or, at least, be must have
qualified for the hulks.

The other day it was our painful office to relate
the sufferings and death of a party of brave and
devoted explorers of the Australian continent.
The story was heroic enough ; but the party were
civilians, and a jaded public seas no materials
for a sensation in the noiseless fate of a few enter-
prising travellers, who climb mountains and tra-
verse wildernesses, and sink at last from sheer
starvation when their work is done. Yet novel-
ists and dramatists are continually torturing their
imaginations for some new effects ; and how many
of them are able to escape for an instant from one
or other of the half.a.dozen "situations" of that
immemorial region of sentiment and fancy bounded
by Love arid Death 1 To be sure, it is generally
supposed that there is no such thing as romance in
these latter days. Were there ever days in which
this vulgar fallacy was unknown f The Present is
always trite and formal. No doubt a man may
spend a night alone at the North Pole, and
come home and have nothing to say about it ;
but this is not the fault of the North Pole.
At all events there is no need for the romance
of daily journalism to travel so far. We have
only to turn to that " North Country " of Eng-
land to discover romance enough in all its elements
of tragic pity, terror, and pathos. Look there,
we say--sentimentalists and fancy chroniclers of
war—look there, where every gale that blows
strews the rock-bound and sand hedged COMA with
wrea. ks, and ravages sawport towns with MOM than
the finy of a devouring pestilerce or a pitiless in-
vader ; where a sudden fall in the weather-glass
proclaims to many a group of women and children
as they stand gazing vacantly out at the hazy
rolling distance, a sentence of desolation and be-
reavement