The Sun.
London, England, 1870-06-06 00:00:00

HhR MAJL'6TI.

BALMORAL CASTLE, June 4.
The Queen went out yesterday morning with Princess
Beata ice, attended by the Hon. Harriet Phipps.
Princess Louise, attended by the Hon. Eva Macdonald,
went out riding.

The Princess of Wales drove but on Saturday morning,
and again in the afternoon.
In the evening the Prince of Wales presided at the annual
dinner of the officers of the 10th Hussars, at Willis's Roems.
The Princess of Wales attended Divine service yesterday
at the Chapel Royal, St. James's.

FASHIONABLI+I ARRANGEMENTS TO-DAY
Lady Catharine Allen's Dance, at 5, BelgTave-square.
The Baroness Meyer de Rothschild's dauc,3 at 107, Picca•

dfily.
The sth Dragoon Guards (Princess Charlotte of Wales's)
Annual Regimental Dinner, at the St. James's Hall,
Piccadilly.
The 16th Lancers' Annual Dinner—appropriately—at the

Cannon-street Station Hotel, at 7.30 p.m.
The Hurlingham Club—the Annual Match between the
Lords and Commons.

SCIENTIFIC MEETINGS-TO-DAY.

The Royal Institution, at 2 p.m. —the General Monthly

Meeting.
The Entomological Society, at 7 p.m.
The Victoria Institute, at 8 p.m., when Mr. J. Reddie
will read a paper on " Civilisation,. Moral and Mate-
rial."
The United Service Institution, at 8.30 p.m., when
Captain H. Schaw will read a paper on " The Amount
of. Advantage the New Arms oi Precision give- to
Defence over Attack."

LITERATURE.

A BOOK FOR SUMMER EXCURSIONISTS.

Fjord, Isle and Tor. By Edward Spender.

One Vol.,

pp. 169. Charlton Tucker,

To those who know nothing about the localities thereby

indicated, the three names constituting the title of this
volume will be sufficiently enigmatical. To those who
are promising themselves the relaxation of a summer or
a little later on, of an autumnal, excursion, without
having as yet any distinct predilection for the whither-
ward of their journeyings, Mr. Spender's work will
come—we may safely at once predict this much—as a God-
send. It will afford them in their uncertainty--what was
always so welcome to Sir Robert Peel, and is still often
so welcome at times to Sir Robert's most illustrious fol-
lower (" Peel's head boy," as he used to be called in
the old days) Mr. Gladstone—not an alternative, but—a
choice between three courses. The three courses here
submitted totheir consideration being—Tor, Isle or Fjord !
Cornwall and the Scilly Islands ; the little Channel
Group of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, and Sark ; or
" best beautiful" among them all, Norway. The notion
out of which this welcome volume has grown, bit by bit,
page by page, through a series of contributions to periodi-
cals as varied' as the London Quarterly and, Ilieliora and
Charles's Wain, is in itself, to our thinking, excellent. It
arises simply from our author's reali7ation to himself through
practical experience of the desirability of the traveller finding
in a compact and portable form, arapid, graphic, and practi-
cally useful sketch of the particular country or locality he
is bent on visiting. Guides of great elaboration, bulky in
form and costly in price, there are, thanks to the encylo-
aswshoemreuwelie, may- -no parsosv:lisitotnle.
immemorialp ce d laboursic
Murray.o f the
Bc ountt rif
obrut
ordinary
r t o otur ra
vpe
lir oevr
se
,r br iea lq
ualined.
m
ghe d
A elinotos
k, there is, is ,
when as a rule—gowi
by avoirdupois—a book light in style when weighed in the
balance of criticism, and yet giving us precisely the infor-
mation about the region of earth we are going to—where
shall we find it ? Well, ordinarily, nowhere ! But—
in regard to three several directions—in regard to Tor, in
regard to Isle, in regard to Fjord—het ere we have precisely
such a work in this charming, y thoroughly practical
little volume from the hands of Mr. Spender. It deserves
a welcome this book we have so long unconsciously been
in search of. And we doubt not it will prove at this
moment to many so delightfully apropos, that it will
settle for them many a doubt as to whither their holi-
day footsteps shall wend—now in the direction of Corn-
well, now in the direction of the small Channel Archi-
prelago, now in the direction of Norway and the Nor-
wegians.intend-
ing excursionist a veritable benefaction. From them he
The itineraries themselves are to the
will learn the time it takes, and the price it costs—
the ways and the means of travelling. Added to
all which the landscapes are often sketched in
with a pen, the seemingly careless and accidental
touches of which have an artistic purpose and
value of their own—the ink they effuse being frequently
as radiant as a water-colour drawing from the hand of
one skilled in the school best of all describable perhaps as
the true Turneresque. Of this character is the description
of the gorgeous atmospheric effects sometimes visible in
the land of the Fjord, the Foss, and the Fjeld.
"We have spoken," says our author, `, of Norway as
the land of the Fjord, the Foss, and the 'jeld. These
are its most striking physical features. They are, more-
over, intimately connected together. They are successive
steps in ' the world's great altar-stairs, that lead,' not,
indeed, ' through darkness,' but through beauty up to
God.' The traveller makes his first acquaintance with
Norway as he threads the mazes of the Fjord. Perchance
it will happen to him, as it happened to me, to enter one
of these mazes when the crimson-dyed horizon was glow-
ing into burnished gold, when the intense brilliance of the
twilight, that was neither wholly sunset nor wholly dawn,
but partook of the beauty of both, flooded the whole
northern and western sky, while, far away in the south-
east, the full-orbed moon shone with metallic lustre ;
when the gentle breeze of summer came borne with a sigh
from this enchanted-seeming land, and laden with the
sweet fragrance of its dark pine-forests ; when the very
idea of sleep seemed a sin, and every sense was aroused
into new and quickened life by the magnificent apotheosis
of colour, so infinitely beyond the power of imagination
to conceive. Should it be one of the principal fjords, the
traveller will have to pass the greater part of the day
before he comes to the head of it. Arrived there, perhaps
a hundred miles from the entrance, he will find a river
roaring renti tumbling into the fjord over great boulder* of
r4eks. A mile or two farther on he will reach the shames
of a wide freeh-water lake) a Vand,' shut in by lefty
mountain % The vend is some hundreds of feet above the
fjord, which is, of course, on the level of the sea. But
beyond the vand there is usually a very rapid ascent. It
is, nevertheless, a long as well as a steep climb to the
mountain tops. Arrived there after, it may be, more
than a day's journey, the traveller finds himself, not on a
peak or a ridge, but a wide waste of gently undulating
moorland ; tins is the fjeld, the reservoir of all those
streams which he saw pouring down the mountain side as
he journeyed up the fjord. Wittich has aptly contrasted
Norway with Switzerland. The mountains in the latter
country he compares to a ridge and furrow roof ; the
mountains in the former to the embrasures of a parapet.
The chief difference between them lies in the enormous
snow-fields of Norway. There is no parallel in Switzer-
land to the Folgefond. These extensive table-lands,
whether on the lower level of the fjelds, or on the higher
level of the snow-fields, will not, however, compare for
beauty with the views even from the minor elevations of
Switzerland. There is not in all Norway a mountain
view to be compared with that from the Righi, still less
with that from the iEggischhorn, least of all with that
from any of the mountain peaks in the Monte Rosa dis-
trict. In another particular Switzerland carries off the
palm ; the chalet is infinitely more picturesque than the
eater. The sater can be compared only with the Irish
cabin as it used to be in the worst days before the
exodus."

Altogether the book is one to carry in one's knapsack, or
Valise during the happy time of our holiday excursion,,
and to give a place to) on our bookshelves, afterwards, as
a most pleasant remembrancer.