My good friends urged me to stop and dine with them, and then make a fair start for the end of my week’s journey. But it was still twelve miles to Saffron Walden, and I was determined to put half of them behind me before dinner. So, taking a second leave of them in the course of three hours, I set out again on my walk, a wiser man in the practical understanding of the proverb, “The longest way around is the shortest way there.” At 2 p.m. I reached Thaxted, and rectified my first notion of the town, formed when I mistook it for Bardfield. Having made six miles extra between the two points, I resumed my walk after a short delay at the latter.
The weather was glorious. A cloudless sun shone upon a little sky-crystalled world of beauty, smaller in every dimension than you ever see in America. And this is a feature of English scenery that will strike the American traveller most impressively at the first glance, whether he looks at it by night or day. It is not that Nature, in adjusting the symmetries of her scenic structures, nicely apportions the skyscape to the landscape of a country merely for artistic effect. It is not because the island of Great Britain is so small in circumference that the sky is proportioned to it, as the crystal is to the dial of a watch; that it is so apparently low; that the stars it holds to its moist, blue bosom are so near at midnight, and the sun so large at noon. It comes, doubtless, from that constant humidity of the atmosphere which distinguishes the climate of England, and gives to both land and sky an aspect which is quite unknown to our great western continent. An American, after having habituated himself to this aspect, on returning to his own country, will be almost surprised at a feature of its scenery which he never noticed before. He will be struck at the loftiness of the sky; at the vividness of its blue and gold, the sharp, unsoftened light of the stars, and, as it were, the contracted pupil of the sun’s eye at mid-day. The sunset glories of our western heavens play upon a ground of rigid blue. “The Northern Lights,” which, at their winter evening illuminations, seem to have shredded into wavy filaments all the rainbows that have spanned the chambers of the East since the Flood, and to upspring, in mirthful fantasy, to hang their infinitely-tinted tresses to the zenith’s golden diadem of stars—even they sport upon the same lofty concave of dewless blue, which looks through and through the lacework and everchanging drapery of their mingled hues in the most witching mazes of their nightly waltz, giving to each a definiteness that our homely Saxon tongue might fit with a name.
But here, on the lower grounds of instructive meditation, is a humbler individuality of the country to notice. Here is the most sadly abused and melancholy living creature in all England’s animal realm that meets me in the midst of these reflections on things supernal and glorious. I will let the Northern Lights go, with their gorgeous pantomimes and midnight revelries, and have a moment’s communing with this unfortunate quadruped. It is called in derision here a “donkey,” but an ass, in a more generous time, when one of his race and size bore upon his back into the Holy City the world’s Saviour and Re-Creator. Poor, libelled, hopeless beast! I pity you from my heart’s heart. How I wish for Sterne’s pen to do you some measure of justice or condolence under this heavy load of opprobrium that bends your back and makes your life so sunless and bitter! Come here, sir!—here is a biscuit for you, of the finest wheat; few of your race get such morsels; so, eat it and be thankful. What ears! No wonder our friend Patrick called you “the father of all rabbits” at first sight. No! don’t turn away your head, as if I were going to strike you.
Most animals are best described from a certain point of view—in a fixed and quiescent attitude. But the donkey should be taken in the very act of this characteristic motion. You put out your hand in the gentlest manner to pat any one of them you meet, and he will instinctively turn away his head for fear of a beating.
There is an interesting speculation now coming up among modern reveries in regard to the immortality of certain animals of great intelligence and domestic virtues. A large and tender kindness of disposition is the father of the thought, it may be; but the thought seems to gain ground and take shape, that so much of apparently human mind and heart as the dog possesses cannot be destined to annihilation at his death, but must live and enlarge in another sphere of existence. Having thus opened, if it may be said reverently, a back-door into immortality for sagacious and affectionate dogs and horses, they leave it ajar for the admission of animals of less intelligence—even for all the kinds that Noah took into the ark, perhaps, although the theory is still nebulous and undefined. Now, I would beg the kind-hearted adherents to this theory not to think I am seeking to play off a satirical pleasantry upon it, if I express a hope, which is earnest and true, that, if there be an immortality for any class of dumb animals, the donkey shall go into it first, and have a better place in it than their parlor dogs or nicely-groomed horses. Evidently they are building up a claim to this illustrious distinction of another existence for these pets on the sole ground of merit, not of works, even, but of mere intelligence, fidelity, and affection. Granted; but the donkey should go in first and take the highest place on that basis. When you come to the standard of moral measurement, it may be claimed as among the highest of human as well as animal virtues, “to learn to suffer and be strong.” And this virtue the donkey has learned and practised incomparably beyond any other creature that ever walked on four legs since the Flood. Let these good people remember that their fanciful and romantic favoritisms are not to rule in the destinies awarded to the infinitesimally human spirits of domestic animals in another world, if another be in reserve for them. Let them remember that their softly-cushioned dogs, and horses so delicately clad, and fed, and fondled, have had a pretty good time of it in this life, and that in another, the poor, despised, abused donkey, going about begging, with such a long and melancholy face, for withered cabbage leaves and woody-grained turnips cast out and trodden under feet of happier animals—that this meek little creature, kicked, cuffed, and club-beaten all the way from hopeless youth to an ignominious grave, will carry into another world merits and mementoes of his earthly lot that will obtain, if not entitle him to, some compensation in the award of a future condition. It is treading on delicate ground even to set one foot within the pale of their unscriptural theory; but as many of them hold the Christian faith in pureness of living and doctrine, let me remind them of that parable which shows so impressively how the disparities in human condition here are reversed in the destinies of the great hereafter.
But, to return to the earthly lot and position of this poor, libelled animal. Among all the four-footed creatures domesticated to the service of man, this has always been the veriest scapegoat and victim of the cruellest and crabbedest of human dispositions. Truly, it has ever been born unto sorrow, bearing all its life long a weight of abuse and contumely which would break the heart of a less sensitive animal in a single week. From the beginning it has been the poor man’s beast of burden; and “pity ’tis ’tis true,” poor men, in all the generations of human poverty, have been far too prone to harshness of temper and treatment towards the beasts that serve them and share their lot of humble life. The donkey is made a kind of Ishmaelite in the great family of domestic animals. He is made, not born so. He is beaten about the head unmercifully with a heavy stick, and then jeered at for being stupid and obstinate! just as if any other creature, of four or two legs, would not be stupid after such fierce congestion of the brain. His long ears subject him to a more cruel prejudice than ever color engendered in the circle of humanity but just above him. True, he is rather unsymmetrical in form. His head is disproportionately long and large, quite sufficient in these dimensions to fit a camel. He is generally a hollow-backed, pot-bellied creature, about the size of a yearling calf, with ungainly, sloping haunches, and long, coarse hair. But nearly all these deformities come out of the shameful treatment he gets. You occasionally meet one that might hold up its head in any animal society; with straight back, symmetrical body and limbs, and hair as soft and sleek