Suppose yourself to have spent the first half of a foggy, sleety, chill,
moist, melancholy, English winter at some miserable country village in
Kent. Suppose about the first of February, while the whole landscape around
is still floating in mud, buried in snow, or fast bound by frost, and the
atmosphere so thick with fog, that one can scarcely point at mid-day to the
spot where the sun stands in the heavens,--that your catarrh grows so
alarming, that in a fit of despondency you trundle yourself aboard a ship
in the Downs getting under way for a warmer climate. Suppose, that after a
smacking run of about eight days before a fresh gale, (during the whole of
which you are of course too sick and qualmy to leave your cot,) you awake
one morning, and find yourself snugly at anchor in the bay of Funchal; and
the romantic, sun-bright mountains of Madeira, gorgeously crested with a
mass of brilliant clouds, looking in at your cabin-window. It seems
downright enchantment! You leap up as if there was a new soul in your body.
You hurry ashore in the first boat. Your cough, lassitude, and qualmishness
have altogether left you. Your step is elastic, and your spirits as buoyant
as a lark in spring. You luxuriate amidst beautiful gardens glowing with
roses, jessamines, honey-suckles, and a thousand other odoriferous shrubs
and flowers in full bloom. You wander through a boundless maze of rising
vineries curling their budding tendrils around the trellis-work, and
terrace above terrace up the declivities of the mountains. You recline
among orange-groves bending under the load of ripe golden fruit; and as you
stretch yourself at ease by some clear, gurgling rill, in the midst of all
this loveliness, you ask yourself, is this a dream--or are these indeed the
gardens of the Hesperides? Reader, if you have the blue devils at
Christmas, you may realize all this, and reach Madeira, as I have done, in
eight days from the Downs.
_London Weekly Review._
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