John Bull, who is always a grumbler
even on his own shores, is sure to become a still more inveterate
grumbler in other countries, and perhaps the climate of Bengal,
producing lassitude and low spirits, and a yearning for their native
land, of which they are so justly proud, contribute to make our
countrymen in the East even more than usually unsusceptible of
pleasurable emotions until at last they turn away in positive disgust
from the scenes and objects which remind them that they are in a state
of exile.
"There is nothing," says Hamlet, "either good or bad, but thinking makes
it so." At every change of the mind's colored optics the scene before it
changes also. I have sometimes contemplated the vast metropolis of
England--or rather _of the world_--multitudinous and mighty LONDON--with
the pride and hope and exultation, not of a patriot only, but of a
cosmopolite--a man. Its grand national structures that seem built for
eternity--its noble institutions, charitable, and learned, and
scientific, and artistical--the genius and science and bravery and moral
excellence within its countless walls--have overwhelmed me with a sense
of its glory and majesty and power. But in a less admiring mood, I have
quite reversed the picture. Perhaps the following sonnet may seem to
indicate that the writer while composing it, must have worn his colored
spectacles.
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