While in London I had much pleasure in strolling through the great
parks, Hyde Park, Regent's Park, St. James Park, Victoria Park, and in
making Sunday excursions to Richmond Park, Hampden Court Parks, and the
great parks at Windsor Castle. The magnitude of all these parks was
something I was entirely unprepared for, and their freedom also; one
could roam where he pleased. Not once did I see a signboard, "Keep off
the grass," or go here or go there. There was grass enough, and one
could launch out in every direction without fear of trespassing on
forbidden ground. One gets used, at least I do, to such petty parks at
home, and walks amid them so cautiously and circumspectly, every shrub
and tree and grass plat saying "Hands off," that it is a new sensation
to enter a city pleasure ground like Hyde Park,--a vast natural
landscape, nearly two miles long and a mile wide, with broad, rolling
plains, with herds of sheep grazing, and forests and lakes, and all as
free as the air. He have some quite sizable parks and reservations in
Washington, and the citizen has the right of way over their tortuous
gravel walks, but he puts his foot upon the grass at the risk of being
insolently hailed by the local police. I have even been called to order
for reclining upon a seat under a tree in the Smithsonian grounds. I
must sit upright as in church. But in Hyde Park or Regent's Park I
could not only walk upon the grass, but lie upon it, or roll upon it,
or play "one catch all" with children, boys, dogs, or sheep upon it;
and I took my revenge for once for being so long confined to gravel
walks, and gave the grass an opportunity to grow under my foot whenever
I entered one of these parks.
This free-and-easy rural character of the London parks is quite in
keeping with the tone and atmosphere of the great metropolis itself,
which in so many respects has a country homeliness and sincerity, and
shows the essentially bucolic taste of the people; contrasting in this
respect with the parks and gardens of Paris, which show as unmistakably
the citizen and the taste for art and the beauty of design and
ornamentation. Hyde Park seems to me the perfection of a city pleasure
ground of this kind, because it is so free and so thoroughly a piece of
the country, and so exempt from any petty artistic displays.
In walking over Richmond Park I found I had quite a day's work before
me, as it was like traversing a township; while the great park at
Windsor Castle, being upwards of fifty miles around, might well make
the boldest pedestrian hesitate. My first excursion was to Hampton
Court, an old royal residence, where I spent a delicious October day
wandering through Bushy Park, and looking with covetous, though
admiring eyes upon the vast herds of deer that dotted the plains, or
gave way before me as I entered the woods. There seemed literally to be
many thousands of these beautiful animals in this park, and the loud,
hankering sounds of the bucks, as they pursued or circled around the
does, was a new sound to my ears. The rabbits and pheasants also were
objects of the liveliest interest to me, and I found that after all a
good shot at them with the eye, especially when I could credit myself
with alertness or stealthiness, was satisfaction enough.
I thought it worthy of note that, though these great parks in and about
London were so free, and apparently without any police regulations
whatever, yet I never saw prowling about them any of those vicious,
ruffianly looking characters that generally infest the neighborhood of
our great cities, especially of a Sunday. There were troops of boys,
but they were astonishingly quiet and innoxious, very unlike American
boys, white or black, a band of whom making excursions into the country
are always a band of outlaws. Ruffianism with us is no doubt much more
brazen and pronounced, not merely because the law is lax, but because
such is the genius of the people.