No More Learning

'"

From the pedestrian excursion of the Table and the Chair, we cannot resist
making a brief quotation, though in this, as in every case, the inability
to quote the drawings also is a sad drawback:--

"So they both went slowly down,
And walked about the town,
With a cheerful bumpy sound,
As they toddled round and round.
And everybody cried,
As they hastened to their side,
'See, the Table and the Chair
Have come out to take the air! '

"But in going down an alley
To a castle in a valley,
They completely lost their way,
And wandered all the day,
Till, to see them safely back,
They paid a Ducky-Quack,
And a Beetle and a Mouse,
Who took them to their house.

"Then they whispered to each other,
'O delightful little brother,
What a lovely walk we've taken!
Let us dine on Beans and Bacon! '
So the Ducky and the leetle
Browny-Mousy, and the Beetle
Dined, and danced upon their heads,
Till they toddled to their beds. "

"The Story of the Four little Children who went Round the World" follows
next, and the account of the manner in which they occupied themselves while
on shipboard may be transcribed for the benefit of those unfortunate
persons who have not perused the original: "During the day-time Violet
chiefly occupied herself in putting salt-water into a churn, while her
three brothers churned it violently in the hope it would turn into butter,
which it seldom if ever did. " After journeying for a time, they saw some
land at a distance, "and when they came to it they found it was an island
made of water quite surrounded by earth. Besides that it was bordered by
evanescent isthmuses with a great Gulf-Stream running about all over it, so
that it was perfectly beautiful, and contained only a single tree, five
hundred and three feet high. " In a later passage, we read how "by-and-by
the children came to a country where there were no houses, but only an
incredibly innumerable number of large bottles without corks, and of a
dazzling and sweetly susceptible blue color. Each of these blue bottles
contained a bluebottlefly, and all these interesting animals live
continually together in the most copious and rural harmony, nor perhaps in
many parts of the world is such perfect and abject happiness to be found. "
Our last quotation from this inimitable recital shall be from the
description of their adventure on a great plain where they espied an object
which "on a nearer approach and on an accurately cutaneous inspection,
seemed to be somebody in a large white wig sitting on an arm-chair made of
sponge-cake and oyster-shells. " This turned out to be the "Co-operative
Cauliflower," who, "while the whole party from the boat was gazing at him
with mingled affection and disgust . . .
suddenly arose, and in a somewhat
plumdomphious manner hurried off towards the setting sun, his steps
supported by two superincumbent confidential cucumbers . . . till he finally
disappeared on the brink of the western sky in a crystal cloud of sudorific
sand. So remarkable a sight of course impressed the four children very
deeply; and they returned immediately to their boat with a strong sense of
undeveloped asthma and a great appetite. "

In his third book, Mr. Lear takes occasion in an entertaining preface to
repudiate the charge of harboring any ulterior motive beyond that of
"Nonsense pure and absolute" in any of his verses or pictures, and tells a
delightful anecdote illustrative of the "persistently absurd report" that
the Earl of Derby was the author of the first book of "Nonsense. " In this
volume he reverts once more to the familiar form adopted in his original
efforts, and with little falling off. It is to be remarked that the third
division is styled "Twenty-Six Nonsense Rhymes and Pictures," although
there is no more rhyme than reason in any of the set. Our favorite
illustrations are those of the "Scroobious Snake who always wore a Hat on
his Head, for fear he should bite anybody," and the "Visibly Vicious
Vulture who wrote some Verses to a Veal-cutlet in a Volume bound in
Vellum. " In the fourth and last of Mr. Lear's books, we meet not only with
familiar words, but personages and places,--old friends like the Jumblies,
the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, the Quangle Wangle, the hills of the Chankly Bore,
and the great Gromboolian plain, as well as new creations, such as the Dong
with a luminous Nose, whose story is a sort of nonsense version of the love
of Nausicaa for Ulysses, only that the sexes are inverted. In these verses,
graceful fancy is so subtly interwoven with nonsense as almost to beguile
us into feeling a real interest in Mr. Lear's absurd creations. So again in
the Pelican chorus there are some charming lines:--

"By day we fish, and at eve we stand
On long bare islands of yellow sand.
And when the sun sinks slowly down,
And the great rock-walls grow dark and brown,
When the purple river rolls fast and dim,
And the ivory Ibis starlike skim,
Wing to wing we dance around," etc.