among the legends of the old Teutonic Mythology.

Naturally, though my rambles have led me over all London and its vicinity, I have my favourite neighbourhoods. The northern suburbs of London-in part, I suppose, because circumstances made them first familiar to me, and I can still reach them most easily-have always had the strongest attractions for me. In two out of every three of my walks I find myself taking that direction. Above all I have a liking for Hampstead Heath. There is no spot on the skirts of London to which I go so often. Tastes for scenery differ, and much depends on habit and association; but I really do not think that there is anywhere round London a bit of open Country comparable for rough and yet lovely picturesqueness to the old heath beyond Hampstead village. For one thing, the ground is about the highest near London; and, though that is not saying much, I like the highest ground that happens anywhere to be accessible. From one point or another on Hampstead Heath one has a wide view, both Londonwards to the steeples and smoke, and over the rolling flats and meadows that extend north from the metropolis, promising the richness of middle England. And then the Heath itself! is the most untouched bit of old English earth that I know of near London. Everything about it still answers to its name. The sandy knolls and hollows of which the whole of it consists, covered with wild grass and clumped with furze, suggest that, centuries ago, it was very much the same, and that, whatever changes may have been worked by the plough and by the art of man all round to its very borders, here at least we have a genuine piece of aboriginal heath and hillock as it may have been known to Boadicea and the Druids. Encroachments are, indeed, being made on the Heath from the London side. Even in the few years since I remember it, the parts of it are new; and the remorseless brick-and-mortar has been creeping towards it, in the shape of new villas and advancing lines of

roads across

It

houses. But still the main immediate access to it is through the steep village of Hampstead, the houses of which at its topmost slope are sufficiently quaint and old; and the detached family-mansions beyond the village, which stand on parts of the Heath itself or nestle round it, are mostly of the last or of the preceding century, and wear, in their substantial forms and in their oldfashioned palings, gateways, and shrubberies, a look in keeping with the natural antiquity around them. When to all this is added a series of historical associations, investing Hampstead and its vicinity with unusual interest to men who read-associations beginning in the old times of feud and battle, and growing thicker, and more intellectual in their nature, down to those days, but recently gone, when Coleridge and Hunt and Keats, and others of a famous literary fraternity, had their homes in or near Hampstead, and used to roam daily about the Heath and make this or that spot of it immortal with their meetings or meditations-little wonder that there should be among so many Londoners a wish for the conservation as it is of this

healthy holiday resort for such as know its charms. Though not a Londoner born, I have reason to join in this wish. For, as I have said, of all spots round London, Hampstead Heath is that with which my feet are most fondly familiar, and which I have taken to my heart by most frequent intercourse of musing and thought.

I know the Heath by all its approaches. Often enough I have made my way to it by the direct approach up the steep main street of Hampstead village. Sometimes, after rambling about the neighbouring heights of Highgate, I have come upon it circuitously thence. But my favourite way is by one or other of the winding lanes, or of the paths over the fields, striking off to the right from the Finchley Road, and leading, most of them, close past old Hampstead Church, and so by continued ascent to the edge of the Heath. Reaching the Heath by any of these approaches, it has been my invariable custom, on fine

summer-days, after wandering over it hither and thither, avoiding as much as possible the groups and little crowds that then frequent parts of it, to make for one spot for which I have a special affection. I do not know whether it has any name to distinguish it from the rest of the Heath; but I call it "The Pines." It is a spot at the farther or northern end of the Heath, just to the left of the road, where it leaves the Heath and passes to the country beyond. The striking feature of the spot consists in a few tall old pine-trees, which there rise on a kind of bank higher than the general level of the heath on that side. The pines are in two rows, and seem to be the last stragglers, spared by many a tempest, of what may at one time have been a stately avenue. Even since I remember, one or two have been blown down and have left gaps in their places; and those that remain have a doomed and blasted look-their trunks bent all one way, showing from what direction has come the prevailing wind against which, since first they grew, they have vibrated and struggled; their ragged tops driven, like witch-hair, the same way; and the knuckles of the old roots by which they yet grasp the soil exposed here and there by the crumbling of the bank. From afar off on the Heath these pines are conspicuous objects; and whoever had an eye for the weirdly and venerable in any scene he was exploring would instinctively make for them. On the other hand, from these pines there is one of the best and most commanding views of the Heath itself-not of the whole heath, but of one considerable and picturesque tract of it lying like a great hollow due underneath, and, beyond that again, of a wide expanse of country stretching to the western horizon. And yet, though so close to the road that crosses the Heath, and within hail of one or two of the old mansions that abut upon it, The Pines do not seem a much-frequented spot by the holiday ramblers. Probably there is too much of weirdlike and mournful in the look of this particular spot to accord with the mood of most of them.

It was, however, as might be expected, a favourite spot of the Heath with Hunt and Keats; and stray groups and couples are to be seen there even now in the fine afternoons-seated on the wooden seat under the pines where Hunt and Keats, or sometimes Coleridge, may have sat, or else on the lip of the bank itself, where, amid the exposed roots of the pines, it slopes down into the hollowand looking thence, as those dead may have done, over the hollow, and away to the miles of vanishing meadows. Never once, however, have I found the place so much preoccupied that I could not be there in quiet. Oh, how I know the Pines, and the Hollow which they survey! The Pines and the Hollow-these two phrases have come to mean for me a thousand things more than they themselves express-representations and epitomes of often-repeated tissues of thought, the mystic beginnings and ends of which I could not unravel though I would, and of which I know not myself the full significance. In the summer days I have sat under the Pines, when the whole hollow was abloom with the yellow gorse, and the air was thrilling with the songs of larks, and all was gladness and life and sunshine. Even then there was a touch of something haggard and supernatural in the spot. The Pines rose strangely, their stems bent all one way, like no ordinary trees; and overhead, if one looked up, the witch-hair of their ragged tops was turned to the Hollow. But, when I sat on till towards evening, and the holiday stragglers began to disappear and leave me alone, then the sensations of the spot would become, shade by shade, more and more dark and mysterious, as of a brow gradually frowning. As the light waned over the Hollow, and the steams of evening arose over the far meadows, all things became as if indistinctly changing and moving, and put on an appearance different from what they had borne by day; while, as if reciprocating this change and motion, and striving to meet it, the pine-trunks overhead and behind me would seem to stir and sigh, and in their witch-hair aloft would be heard rustlings and whis

perings. At such times it was that recollections of the Heath, not apt to occur in broad day, would creep unbidden into my memory-recollections that not only had heroic deeds of ancient feud and battle been done among these hillocks and mounds, and not only had sages and poets walked amid these scenes, meditating and exchanging fancies, but crimes noted in our black calendar had here been enacted, and in that hollow there had been the unavailing shrieks of murdered victims, feeling the cold knife in their throats, and that last surprised pang of their chief friend turned a fiend, and in the same hollow suicides that had walked from London had lain down to die. But, in the dead and darkness of night, when all the Heath is solitary, then do these recollections come forth most dreadfully to mingle with the others, and that spot of the Pines, where they command the Hollow, becomes a spot of utter ghastliness. Then, too, I have been there, and known what I know. In late autumn-nights, ay and in nights of dark winter, I have found myself there. I have been there alone when the nocturnal tempest was howling to a hurricane, and the pines over me and behind me groaned as in agony, and their witchhair whistled, and over the hollow and the black or shimmering flats the tempest roared its many-tongued music, while either the heaven above was one bell of dead opaque, or nought was to be seen but heaps of cloud-rack and here and there in a rift a few keen stars. There was a time when I could not have dared so awful a solitude-when courage would have failed me to make the attempt, or reason might have failed me if caught amid such horrors and unable to flee. That time is gone. Tempests in my own life have made me a match for all that Nature can do in her way of tempest; I have been shattered and racked by such grief that my being is in calm unison with all other being in the hour of its utmost conceivable torture and conflict; and not on the most demon-haunted heath, with laughs and noises heard behind me, and the firmest

expectation of apparitions to rise and face me, would my feeling be fear.

Last Christmas Eve I had returned to my rooms after a walk through the streets during the whole afternoon. I had shut myself in, lit the lights, wheeled my chair to the fire, and begun to read, not meaning to go out again that night. But somehow my restlessness seized me. Things I had seen during my walk-various signs and preparations for the joyous homegatherings that were everywhere to be on that evening and on the morrow-had reminded me of what, disconnected as I was from the world, I had otherwise forgotten. Bunches of holly, which, I suppose, I had seen in shop-windows, recurred to my vision, with their knots of red berries mixed with the pale berries of the mistletoe. I remembered that it was Christmas Eve; and back my thoughts were carried to other Christmases, when I had not been what I then was, and for me also, under a roof whence the red and white berries had hung over groups of fair dancers, while the old and sedate sat round, there had been happy visions and phantasies of the future. Memories came in such crowds as at last to be unendurable. That first resource of the troubled spirit, the walk to and fro within the room from end to end, failed to calm me; I needed the width and larger locomotion of the open air. At length, taking my hat and coat from their pegs, and my stick from the corner, I again went out. By what precise route I went I know not; but I am conscious of having passed through streets in which there were crowds, and in which, under flaring jets of gas, there were shops and stalls of butchers and poulterers, set out with Christmas fare in all its varieties of raw and plucked, while the crowds gathered there thickest, and the busy salesmen cut and handled and shouted their cries. An hour at least must have passed from my leaving my room when I found myself beyond the region of stated lamps, and in the quiet north-stretching darkness of the Finchley Road, with the hedge and the

rising lands towards Hampstead on the one side, and the lower hedge and sunken range of fields on the other. My destination was then clear to me. Walking on, and turning up the lane leading to old Hampstead Church, I deviated into the off-lane that passes close by the church and churchyard. This churchyard, however, is divided into two parts-one round the church, walled and railed in; the other a sort of supplementary burying-ground, on a detached slope, with the breadth of the lane between. Skirting this supplementary burying-ground, there is another narrow ascending lane, at right angles to the former, leading to some solitary houses, and so by various ins and outs to the vicinity of the Heath. Threading this ascending lane in the dark, first with the white head-stones of the burying-ground gleaming on my right, and then past the silent houses, I came out at last on the cool and houseless heights. Along the road my steps led me-one valley of the Heath deep on one side of me, and its main part stretching more extensively and looming more vaguely on the other. Here and there at a distance I saw lights, coming from one or another of the old mansions hidden in the depths around. But I met not a soul; and in a little while, leaving the road, I was seated alone in my old spot under the Pines, looking into and over the Hollow.

The night was dark, yet not very dark, and still and calm enough for that season of the year. How long I sat I know not; nor can I remember very exactly the current and sequence of my thoughts. I can remember, generally, that they began with myself and with those memories of my own past which had driven me thither for solace, and that then they were very bitter, but that gradually, as my eyes all the while were peering into the darkness of the great Hollow, and sweeping across it to the strange expanses beyond, they enlarged their circle and diffused themselves into a contemplation of time and vicissitude, of Life and Death. So

long I sat, gazing where no gaze could bring any distinct vision out of the gloom, and thinking where no thought could reach a shore or islet of certainty in a boundless sea, that at last I must have lapsed into some kind of tranquil trance, or state between sleeping and waking. This, at least, is what happened to me: —

The dark Hollow seemed suddenly to stir and move. Far off in it I saw a spark of green light, like that of a glowworm; which light, moving straight across the Hollow towards me, but without increasing, disappeared for a moment when it came under the high bank where I sat, but only to reappear again on the edge of the bank close in front of me. Then I saw that the green light was borne on the forehead of the strangest diminutive creature, whose eyes also were green, and whose long arms all but touched the ground. The creature seemed to try to speak, but to be unable. But, as my eyes were fixed upon it, I became aware of another figure, of which it seemed to be the harbinger. It was the form of a female, mantled and hooded in white so that I could not see her countenance, and so tall that, though she seemed to stand, not on the edge of the bank, but on the slope, with only part of her form visible above the bank, that part exceeded the ordinary height of woman. The green-eyed creature had now vanished; and this feminine apparition between me and the Hollow was all that I saw. Standing immoveably as I first saw her, and without raising arm or mantle, she seemed to sing or chaunt these words; at least I heard the words sung solemnly and clearly, and they seemed to come from her :—

"Earth and tree, tree and earth,
Stars and air, air and stars,
These are not all:

Not a thing that e'er had birth
But still it lurks, though past the bars
Of seeing, on this ball!

Then follow me, follow
Into the hollow,
Where to and fro

The dead things go!

"Old and brown, brown and old, Rise the pines, while with moans

The night-wind raves;

A thousand years lie in their mould;
Round their roots are miles of bones,
A silent world of graves!
Yet follow me, follow
Down to the hollow:
I know of breath

Where all seems Death"!"

Methought I did follow. I seemed mechanically to rise and descend the bank after the spectre, which receded from me down into the Hollow, always at the same distance from me, and the muffled face still towards me. I had gone down into the Hollow, and advanced some little way into its darkness, still drawn by the power of the Apparition, when an impediment seemed to arrest me-no solid impediment, but as it were a sudden aerial wall of total blackness, in which I was involved. There I stood foot-bound and fixed, as in a black marble element, wherein, though my feet could not move, I could yet grope forward with my arms and hands. The spectral figure that had led me so far had now disappeared--swallowed up in the ulterior space of the Hollow, into which she had been received when the separating blackness had arrested and detained me.

While I was thinking what all this might mean, and groping forward with my arms and hands to see how I might release myself, lo, another wonder! In the blackness straight before me, but, as it might be, at the distance of fifty yards, there came a luminous haze; which haze, gradually brightening, took at last a circular shape, like the luminous disc cast on canvass by a magiclantern. Gazing on this luminous disc, vividly and yet not intolerably bright in the darkness in which it was framed, I could perceive that it was not a plane surface, but a natural scene, or cut-out circle of landscape, in which there was level foreground and some depth of sylvan perspective. Nay, figures began to appear in it in groups of two, one group after another, all various in their costume and action, and yet all somehow representing the same thing-some of

the groups flitting from right to left, or from left to right, across the foreground, and others receding or flying from the foreground into the sylvan depths. These phantasmagories were a mystery to me, until, after there had been many of them in succession, I perceived that one tale was variously told by them all. All the groups, I saw, had consisted from the first of youths and maidenseach, generally, of one youth and one maiden; and, in each, the action had been, in different guises, the same-the maiden coyly, or in alarm, avoiding the youth, and the youth pursuing or wooing the maiden. The first groups, I then remembered, had been wild and antique in their guise and seeming, with something about them which I recognised as old British or Britanno-Roman. To these had succeeded others still antiquely garbed, but not so antiquely; and still, as the series went on, the way and fashion of vestment became more familiar-more like what I had heard of or read of in histories and romances. But then I perceived also-what it surprised me that I had not observed beforethat, all the while that these phantasmagories had been presenting themselves to me, the luminous disc wherein they flitted had been slowly growing larger in circumference, varying its scenery of ground and wood, and at the same time gradually approaching So amazed was I at this phenomenon that I took less note of the later and enlarging groups, till suddenly, as by a leap or burst of the now widelydiffused space of light towards me, I was no longer standing in blackness, gazing at a luminous disc separate from myself, but was as if caught into the threshold of a large well-lit room, full of company, into which I could look, so as to see all from floor to roof and from wall to wall. Yes, strange as was the transformation, it was a room-a large, luxurious, modern room, full of merriment and living people. But all the people were youths and maidens; there was not among them, so far as I could see, one person of graver years to exercise rule over the mirth. There were

me.