I tried in various quarters to get presented to her--for she shewed not the slightest sign of having ever met me--but failed every where: they who knew her did not do so intimately enough to introduce me.
The reminiscences I have just jotted down have made me miserably feverish and ill; for although I now begin to doubt that I ever saw this Countess before, the sad story of Caroline Graham is ever present to my mind--a terrible type of the fortune of many a fair English girl left to the merciless caprice of a foreign husband!
I am not bigot enough to fancy that happy, eminently happy, marriages do not exist abroad as well as with us; but I am fully minded to say that the individuals should be of the same nation, reared in the midst of the same traditions, imbued with feelings that a common country, language, and religion bestow.
I know of nothing that presents so pitiable a picture of unhappy destiny, as a fair and delicately minded English girl the wife of a foreigner! How I wish to resolve my doubts in this case! for although I began this memorandum fully persuaded it was Caroline Graham that I had seen, every line I write increases my uncertainty.
It was with a rare audacity that the devil pitched his tent in Baden! Perhaps, on the whole continent, another spot could not be found so fully combining, in a small circuit, as many charms of picturesque scenery; and it was a bold conception to set down vice, in all its varieties, in the very midst of--in open contrast as it were to--a scene of peaceful loveliness and beauty.
I do confess myself one of those who like living figures in a landscape. I like not only those groupings which artists seem to stereotype, so nearly alike they all are, of seated foreground figures, dark-shadowed observers of a setting sun, or coolly watering cattle beneath a gushing fountain. I like not merely the red-kirtled peasant knee-deep in the river, or the patient fisherman upon his rock; but I have a strong regard--I mean here, where the scene is Nature's own, and not on canvass--a strong regard for those flitting glimpses of the gayer world, which, in the brightest tints that Fashion sanctions, are caught now, in some deep dell of the Tyrol, now, on some snow-peaked eminence of a Swiss glacier, beside the fast-rolling Danube or the sluggish Nile.