FARM GAME--HALLETT WHEAT--OUNDLE--COUNTRY BRIDGES--FOTHERINGAY
CASTLE--QUEEN MARY'S IMPRISONMENT AND EXECUTION--BURGHLEY HOUSE:
THE PARK, AVENUES, ELMS, AND OAKS--THOUGHTS ON TREES, ENGLISH AND
AMERICAN.
Having now pursued a westerly direction until I was in the range of
a continuous upland section of country, I took a northward course
and walked on to Oundle, a goodly town in Northamptonshire, as
unique as its name. On the way, in crossing over to another
turnpike road, I passed through a large tract of land in a very
deshabille condition, rough, boggy and bushy. I soon found it was a
game-growing estate, and very productive of all sorts of birds and
small quadrupeds. The fields I crossed showed a promising crop of
hares and rabbits; and doubtless there were more partridges on that
square mile than in the whole State of Connecticut. This is a
characteristic of the country which will strike an American, at his
first visit, with wonder. He will see hares and rabbits bobbing
about on common farms, and partridges in broods, like separate
flocks of hens and chickens, in fields of grain, within a stone's
throw of the farmer's house. I doubt if any county in New England
produces so many in a year as the holding of Mr. Samuel Jonas
already described. Rabbits have been put out of the pale of
protection somewhat recently, I believe, and branded with the bad
name of _vermin_; so that the tenant farmer may kill them on his
occupation without leave or license from the landlord. It may
indicate their number to state the fact, that one hundred and
twenty-five head of them were killed in one day's shooting on Mr.
Jonas's estate by his sons and some of their friends.
It was market day in Oundle, and I had the pleasure of sitting down
to dinner with a large company of farmers and cattle and corn-
dealers. They were intelligent, substantial-looking men, with no
occupational peculiarity of dress or language to distinguish them
from ordinary middle-class gentlemen engaged in trade or
manufacture. Indeed, the old-fashioned English farmer, of the
great, round, purply-red face, aldermanic stature, and costume of
fifty years ago, speaking the dialect of his county with such
inimitable accent, is fast going out. I have not seen one during my
present sojourn in England. I fear he has disappeared altogether
with the old stage-coach, and that we have not pictures enough of
him left to give the rising generation any correct notion of what he
was, and how he looked. It may be a proper and utilitarian change,
but one can hardly notice without regret what transformations the
railway regime has wrought in customs and habits which once
individualised a country and people. A kind of French
centralisation in the world of fashion has been established, which
has over-ridden and obliterated all the dress boundaries of
civilised nations. All the upper and middle classes of Christendom
centre themselves to one focus of taste and merge into one plastic
commonwealth, to be shaped and moulded virtually by a common tailor.
Their coats, vests, pantaloons, boots and shoes are made
substantially after the same pattern. For a while, hats stood out
with some show of pluck and patriotism, and made a stand for
national individuality, but it was in vain. They, too, succumbed to
the inexorable law of Uniformity. That law was liberal in one
respect. It did not insist that the stove-pipe form should rule
inflexibly. It admitted several variations, including wide-awakes,
pliable felts, and that little, squat, lackadaisical, round-crown,
narrow-brimmed thing worn by the Prince of Wales in the photographs
taken of him and the Princess at Sandringham. But this has come to
be the rule: that hats shall no longer represent distinct
nationalities; that they shall be interchangeable in all civilised
communities; in a word, that neither Englishman, American, French
nor German shall be known by his hat, whatever be the form or
material of its body or brim. If there were a southern county in
England where the mercury stood at 100 degrees in the shade for two
or three summer months, the upper classes in it would don, without
any hesitation, the wide, flappy broadbrims of California, and still
be in the fashion,--that is, variety in uniformity. The peasantry,
or the lowest laboring classes of European countries, are now, and
will remain perhaps for a century to come, the only conservators of
the distinctive national costumes of bygone generations.
During the conversation at the table, a farmer exhibited a head of
the Hallett wheat, which he had grown on his land. I never saw
anything to equal it, in any country in which I have travelled. It
was nearly six inches in length, and seeded large and plump from top
to bottom. This is a variety produced by Mr. Hallett, of Brighton,
and is creating no little interest among English grain-growers.
Lord Burghley, who had tested its properties, thus describes it, in
a speech before the Northamptonshire Agricultural Society last
summer:--
"At the Battersea Show last year, my attention was called to some
enormous ears of wheat, which I thought could not have been grown in
England. For, although the British farmer can grow corn with
anyone, I had never seen such wheat here, and thought it must be
foreign wheat. I went to the person who was threshing some out, and
having been informed that it was sown only with one seed in a hole,
I procured some of Mr. Hallett, of Brighton; and, being anxious to
try the system, I planted it according to Mr. Hallett's directions--
one grain in a hole, the holes nine and a half inches apart, with
six inches between the rows. To satisfy myself on the subject, I
also planted some according to Stephen's instructions, who said
three grains in a hole would produce the most profitable return. I
also planted some two grains in a hole. I sowed the grain at the
end of last September, on bad land, over an old quarry, and except
some stiff clay at the bottom of it, there was nothing in it good
for wheat. The other day I counted the stalks of all three. On Mr.
Stephen's plan of three grains in a hole, there were eighteen
stalks; with two grains in a hole, there was about the same number;
but with one seed in a hole, the lowest number of stalks was
sixteen, and the highest twenty-two. I planted only about half an
acre as a trial, and when I left home a few days since, it looked as
much like eight quarters (sixty-four bushels) to the acre as any I
have seen. The ears are something enormous. I would certainly
recommend every farmer to make his own experiments, for if it
succeeds, it will prove a great economy of seed; and drills to
distribute it fairly are to be had."
Truly one of Hallett's wheat ears might displace the old cornucopia
in that picture of happy abundance so familiar to old and young.
Here are twenty ears from one seed, containing probably a thousand
grains. The increase of a thousand-fold, or half that ratio, is
prodigious, having nothing to equal it in the vegetable world that
we know of. If one bushel of seed wheat could be so distributed by
a drill as to produce 500 or 250 bushels at the harvest, certainly
the staff of life would be greatly cheapened to the millions who
lean upon it alone for subsistence.
From Oundle I walked the next day to Stamford, a good, solid, old
English town, sitting on the corners of three counties, and on three
layers of history, Saxon, Dane and Norman. The first object of
interest was a stone bridge over the Nen at Oundle. It is a grand
structure to span such a little river. It must have cost three
times as much as "The Great Bridge" over the Connecticut at
Hartford; and yet the stream it crosses is a mere rivulet compared
with our New England river. "The bridge with wooden piers" is a
fabric of fancy to most English people. They have read of such a
thing in Longfellow's poems, but hardly realise that it exists still
in civilised countries. Here bridges are works of art as well as of
utility, and rank next to the grand old cathedrals and parish
churches for solidity and symmetry. Their stone arches are
frequently turned with a grace as fine as any in St. Paul's, and
their balustrades and butments often approach the domain of
sculpture.
Crossing the Nen, I followed it for several miles in a northerly
direction. I soon came to a rather low, level section of the road,
and noticed stones placed at the side of it, at narrow intervals,
for a long distance to the very foot of a village situated on a
rising ground. These stones were evidently taken from some ancient
edifice, for many of them bore the marks of the old cathedral or
castle chisel. They were the foot-tracks of a ruined monument of
dark and painful history. More than this might be said of them.
They were the blood-drops of a monstrosity chased from its den and
hunted down by the people, who shuddered with horror at its
sanguinary record of violence and wrong. As I approached the quiet
village, whose pleasant-faced houses, great and small, looked like a
congregation of old and young sitting reverently around the parish
church and listening to the preaching of the belfry, I saw where
these stones came from. There, on that green, ridgy slope, where
the lambs lay in the sun by the river, these stones, and a million
more scattered hither and thither, once stood in walls high, hideous
and wrathful, for half a dozen centuries and more. If the
breathings of human woe, if the midnight misery of wretched, broken
hearts, could have penetrated these stones, one might almost fancy
that they would have sweat with human histories in the ditch where
they lay, and discolored the puddles they bridged with the bitter
distilment of grief centuries old. On that gentle rising from the
little Nen stood Fotheringay Castle. That central depression among
the soft-carpeted ridges marks the site of the donjon huge and
horrid, where many a knight and lady of noble blood was pinioned or
penned in darkness and hopeless duress centuries before the
unfortunate Mary was born. There nearly half the sad years of her
young life and beauty were prisoned. There she pined in the
sickness of hope deferred, in the corroding anguish of dread
uncertainty, for a space as wide as that between the baptismal font
and presentation at Elizabeth's court. There she laid her white
neck upon the block. There fell the broad axe of Elizabeth's envy,
fear and hate. There fell the fair-haired head that once gilded a
crown and wore all the glory of regal courts--still beautiful in the
setting light of farewell thoughts.
It may be truly said of Fotheringay Castle, that not one stone is
left upon another to mark its foundations. Not Fleet-street Prison,
nor the Bastille itself, went out under a heavier weight of popular
odium. Although public sentiment, as well as the personal taste and
interest of their proprietors, has favored the preservation of the
ruins of old castles and abbeys in Great Britain, Fotheringay bore,
branded deep in its forehead, the mark of Cain, and every man's
hand, of the last generation, seemed to have been turned against it.
It has not only been demolished, but the debris have been scattered
far and wide, and devoted to uses which they scarcely honor. You
will see the well-faced stones for miles around, in garden walls,
pavements, cottage hearths and chimneys, in stables and cow-houses.
In Oundle, the principal hotel, a large castellated building, shows
its whole front built of them.
The great lion of Stamford is the Burghley House, the palace of the
Marquis of Exeter. It may be called so without exaggeration of its
magnificence as a building or of the extent and grandeur of its
surroundings. The edifice itself would cut up into nearly half a
dozen "White Houses," such as we install our American Presidents in
at Washington. Certainly, in any point of view, it is large and
splendid enough for the residence of an emperor and his suite. Its
towers, turrets and spires present a picturesque grove of
architecture of different ages, and its windows, it is said, equal
in number all the days of the year. It was not open to the public
the day I was in Stamford, so I could only walk around it and
estimate its interior by its external grandeur.
But there was an outside world of architecture in the park of
sublimer features to me than even the great palace itself, with all
its ornate and elaborate sculpture. It was the architecture of the
majestic elms and oaks that stood in long ranks and folded their
hands, high up in the blue sky, above the finely-gravelled walks
that radiated outward in different directions. They all wore the
angles and arches of the Gothic order and the imperial belt of
several centuries. I walked down one long avenue and counted them
on either side. There were not sixty on both; yet their green and
graceful roofage reached a full third of a mile. Not sixty to
pillar and turn such an arch as that! I sat down on a seat at the
end to think of it. There was a morning service going on in this
Cathedral of Nature. The dew-moistened, foliated arches so lofty,
so interwebbed with wavy, waky spangles of sky, were all set to the
music of the anthem. "The street musicians of the heavenly city"
were singing one of its happiest hymns out of their mellow throats.
The long and lofty orchestra was full of them. Their twittering
treble shook the leaves with its breath, as it filtered down and
flooded the temple below. Beautiful is this building of God!
Beautiful and blessed are these morning singing-birds of His praise!
Amen!
But do not go yet. No; I will not. Here is the only book I carry
with me on this walk--a Hebrew Psalter, stowed away in my knapsack.
I will open it here and now, and the first words my eye lights upon
shall be a text for a few thoughts on this scene and scenery. And
here they are,--seemingly not apposite to this line of reflection,
yet running parallel to it very closely:
[HEBREW PHRASE]
The best English that can be given of these words we have in our
translation: "Blessed is he who, passing through the valley of
Baca, maketh it a well." Why so? On what ground? If a man had
settled down in that valley for life, there would have been no merit
in his making it a well. It might, in that case, have been an act
of lean-hearted selfishness on his part. Further than this, a man
might have done it who could have had the heart to wall it in from
the reach of thirsty travellers. No such man was meant in the
blessing; nor any man resident in or near the valley. It was he who
was "passing through" it, and who stopped, not to search for a
dribbling vein of water to satisfy his own momentary thirst, but to
make a well, broad and deep, after the oriental circumference, at
which all future travellers that way might drink with gladness.
That was the man on whom the blessing rested as a _condition_, not
as a _wish_. Look at the word, and get the right meaning of it. It
is [HEBREW WORD], not [HEBREW WORD]; it is a blessedness, not a
benediction. It means a permanent reality of happiness, like that
of Obededom, not a cheap "I thank you!" or "the Lord bless you!"
from here and there a man or woman who appreciates the benefaction.
And he deserves the same who, "passing through" the short years of
man's life here on earth, plants trees like the living, lofty
columns of this long cathedral aisle. How unselfish and generous is
this gift to coming generations! How inestimable in its value and
surpassing the worth of wealth!--surpassing the measurement of gold
and silver! From my seat here, I look up to the magnificent
frontage of that baronial palace. I see its towers, turrets and
minarets; its grand and sculptured gateways and portals through this
long, leaf-arched aisle. Not forty, but nearer four hundred years,
doubtless, was that pile in building. Architecture of the pre-
Norman period, and of all subsequent or cognate orders, diversifies
the tastes and shapings of the structure. Suppose the whole should
take fire to-night and burn to the ground. The wealth of the owner
could command genius, skill and labor enough to rebuild it in three
years, perhaps in one. The Czar of all the Russias did as large a
thing once as this last, in the reconstruction of a palace. Perhaps
the building is insured for its positive value, and the insurance
money would erect a better one. But lift an axe upon that tall
centurion of these templed elms. Cut through the closely-grained
rings that register each succeeding year of two centuries. Hear the
peculiar sounding of the heart-strokes, when the lofty, well-poised
structure is balancing itself, and quivering through every fibre and
leaf and twig on the few unsevered tendons that have not yet felt
the keen edge of the woodman's steel. See the first leaning it
cannot recover. Hear the first cracking of the central vertebra;
then the mournful, moaning whir in the air; then the tremendous
crash upon the green earth; the vibration of the mighty trunk on the
ground, like the writhing and tremor of an ox struck by the
butcher's axe; the rebound into the air of dismembered branches; the
frightened flight of leaves and dust, and all the other distractions
of that hour of death and destruction. Look upon that ruin! The
wealth, genius and labor that could build a hundred Windsor Castles,
and rebuild all the cathedrals of England in a decade, could not
rebuild in two centuries that elm to the life and stature you
levelled to the dust in two hours.
Put, then, the man who plants trees for posterity with him who,
"passing through the valley of Baca, maketh it a well." Put him
under the same blessing of his kind, for he deserves it. He gives
them the richest earthly gift that a man can give to a coming
generation. In a practical sense, he gives them _time_. He gives
them a whole century, as an extra. If they would pay a gold
sovereign for every solid inch of oak, they could not hire one built
to the stature of one of these trees in less than two centuries'
time, though they dug about it and nursed it as the man did the vine
in Scripture. Blessed be the builders of these living temples of
Nature! Blessed be the man, rich or poor, old or young, especially
the old, who sets his heart and hand to this cheap but sublime and
priceless architecture.
Let connoisseurs who have seen Memphis, Nineveh, Athens, Rome, or
any or all of the great cities of the East, ancient or modern, come
and sit here, and look at this lofty corridor, and mark the orders
and graces of its architecture. What did the Ptolemies, their
predecessors or successors in Egypt, or sovereigns of Chaldaic
names, in Assyria, or ambitious builders in the ages of Pericles or
Augustus, in Greece or Rome? Their structures were the wonders of
the world. Mighty men they were, whose will was law, whose subjects
worked it out to its wildest impulse without a murmur or a reward.
But who built this sixty-columned temple, and bent these lofty
arches? Two or three centuries ago, two men in coarse garb, and, it
may be, in wooden shoes, came here with a donkey, bearing on its
back a bundle of little elms, each of a finger's girth. They came
with the rude pick and spade of that time; and, in the first six
working hours of the day, they dug thirty holes on this side of the
aisle, and planted in them half the tiny trees of their bundle.
They then sat down at noon to their bread and cheese and, most
likely, a mug of ale, and talked of small, home matters, just as if
they were dibbling in a small patch of wheat or potatoes. They then
went to work again and planted the other row; and, as the sun was
going down, they straightened their backs, and, with hands stayed
upon their hips, looked up and down the two lines and thought they
would pass muster and please the master. Then they shouldered their
brightened tools and went home to their low, dark cottages,
discussing the prices of bread, beer and bacon, and whether the
likes of them could manage to keep a pig and make a little meat in
the year for themselves.
That is the story of this most magnificent structure to which you
look up with such admiration. Those two men in smock frocks, each
with a pocket full of bread and cheese, were the Michael Angelos of
this lofty St. Peter's. That donkey, with its worn panniers, was
the only witness and helper of their work. And it was the work of a
day! They may have been paid two English shillings for it. The
little trees may have cost two shillings more, if taken from another
estate. The donkey's day was worth sixpence. O, wooden-shoed
Ptolemies! what a day's work was that for the world! They thought
nothing of it--nothing more than they would of transplanting sixty
cabbages. They most likely did the same thing the next day, and for
most of the days of that year, and of the next year, until all these
undulating acres were planted with trees of every kind that could
grow in these latitudes. How cheap, but priceless, is the gift of
such trees to mankind! What a wealth, what a glory of them can even
a poor, laboring man give to a coming generation! They are the most
generous crops ever sown by human hands. All others the sower reaps
and garners into his own personal enjoyment; but this yields its
best harvest to those who come after him. This is a seeding for
posterity. From this well of Baca shall they draw the cooling
luxury of the gift when the hands that made it shall have gone to
dust.
And this is a good place and time to think of home--of what we begin
to hear called by her younger children, _Old_ New England. Trees
with us have passed through the two periods specified by Solomon--"a
time to plant and a time to pluck up." The last came first and
lasted for a century. Trees were the natural enemies to the first
settlers, and ranked in their estimation with the wild Indians,
wolves and bears. It was their first, great business to cut them
down, both great and small. Forests fell before the woodman's axe.
It made clean work, and seldom spared an oak or an elm. But, at the
end of a century, the people relented and felt their mistake. Then
commenced "the time to plant;" first in and around cities like
Boston, Hartford, and New Haven, then about villages and private
homesteads. Tree-planting for use and ornament marks and measures
the footsteps of our civilization. The present generation is
reaping a full reward of this gift to the next. Every village now
is coming to be embowered in this green legacy to the future; like a
young mother decorating a Christmas-tree for her children. Towns
two hundred years old are taking the names of this diversified
architecture, and they glory in the title. New Haven, with a
college second to none on the American Continent, loves to be called
"The Elm City," before any other name. This generous and elevating
taste is making its way from ocean to ocean, even marking the sites
of towns and villages before they are built. I believe there is an
act of the Connecticut Legislature now in force, which allows every
farmer a certain sum of money for every tree he plants along the
public roadside of his fields. The object of this is to line all
the highways of the State with ornamental trees, so that each shall
be a well-shaded avenue. What a gift to another generation that
simple act is intended to make! What a world of wonder and delight
will our little State be to European travellers and tourists of the
next century, if this measure shall be carried out! If a few miles
of such avenues as Burghley Park and Chatsworth present, command
such admiration, what sentiments would a continuous avenue of trees
of equal size from Hartford to New Haven inspire!
While on this line of reflection, I will mention a case of
monumental tree-planting in New England, not very widely known
there. A small town, in the heart of Massachusetts, was stirred to
the liveliest emotion, with all the rest in her borders, by the
Declaration of Independence in 1776. Different communities
expressed their sense of the importance of this event in different
ways, most of which were noisy and excited. But the good people of
this rural parish came together, and, at a happy suggestion from
some one of their number, agreed to spend the day in planting trees
to commemorate the momentous transaction. They forthwith set to
work, young and old, and planted first a double row on each side of
the walk from the main road up "The Green" to their church door;
then a row on each side of the public highway passing through the
village, for nearly a mile in each direction. There was a blessed
day's work for them, their children and children's children. Every
hand that wielded a spade, or held up a treelet until its roots were
covered with earth, has long since lost its cunning; but the tall,
green monuments they erected to the memory of the most momentous day
in American history, stand in unbroken ranks, the glory of the
village.
Although America will never equal England, probably, in compact and
picturesque "plantations," or "woods," covering hundreds of acres,
all planted by hand, our shade-trees will outnumber hers, and
surpass them in picturesque distribution and arrangement, when our
popular programme is fully carried out. In two or three important
particulars, we have a considerable advantage over this country in
respect to this tasteful embellishment. In the first place, all the
farmers in America own the lands they cultivate, and, on an average,
two sides of every farm front upon a public road. Two or three
days' work suffices for planting a row of trees the whole length of
this frontage, or the roadside of the farmer's fence or wall. This
is being done more and more extensively from year to year, generally
under the influence of public taste and custom, and sometimes under
the stimulus of governmental compensation, as in Connecticut. Thus,
in the life of the present generation, all our main roads and cross-
roads may become arched and shaded avenues, giving the whole
landscape of the country an aspect which no other land will present.
Then we have another great advantage which England can never attain
until she learns how to consume her coal smoke. Our wood and
anthracite fires make no smoke to retard the growth or blacken the
foliage of our trees. Thus we may have them in standing armies,
tall and green, lining the streets, and overtopping the houses of
our largest cities; filtering with their wholesome leafage the air
breathed by the people. New Haven and Cleveland are good specimens
of beautifully-shaded towns.
There is a third circumstance in our favor as yet, and of no little
value. The grand old English oak and elm are magnificent trees, in
park or hedge-row here. The horse-chestnut, lime, beech and ash
grow to a size that you will not see in America. The Spanish
chestnut, a larger and coarser tree than our American, reaches an
enormous girth and spread. The pines, larches and firs abound.
Then there are tree-hunters exploring all the continents, and
bringing new species from Japan and other antipodean countries. But
as yet, our maples have never been introduced; and without these the
tree-world of any country must ever lack a beautiful feature, both
in spring, summer and autumn, especially in the latter. Our
autumnal scenery without the maple, would be like the play of Hamlet
with Hamlet left out; or like a royal court without a queen. Few
Americans, even loudest in its praise, realise how much of the glory
of our Indian summer landscape is shed upon it by this single tree.
At all the Flower Shows I have seen in England and France, I have
never beheld a bouquet so glorious and beautiful as a little islet
in a small pellucid lake in Maine, filled to the brim, and rounded
up like a full-blown rose, with firs, larches, white birches and
soft maples, with a little sprinkling of the sumach. An early frost
had touched the group with every tint of the rainbow, and there it
stood in the ruddy glow of the Indian summer, looking at its face in
the liquid mirror that smiled, still as glass, under its feet.
I was much pleased to notice what honor was put upon one of our
humble and despised trees in Burghley House park, as in the grounds
of other noblemen. There was not one that spread such delicate and
graceful tresses on the breeze as our White Birch; not one that
fanned it with such a gentle, musical flutter of silver-lined
leaves; not one that wore a bodice of such virgin white from head to
foot, or that showed such long, tapering fingers against the sky. I
was glad to see such justice done to a tree in the noblest parks in
England, which with us has been treated with such disdain and
contumely. When I saw it here in such glory and honor, and thought
how, notwithstanding its Caucasian complexion, it is regarded as a
nuisance in our woods, meadows and pastures, so that any man who
owns, or can borrow an axe, may cut it down without leave or license
wherever he finds it--when I saw this disparity in its status in the
two Englands, I resolved to plead its cause in my own with new zeal
and fidelity.