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LOITERINGS IN PLEASANT PATHS
BY
MARION HARLAND
_Author of “The Dinner Year-Book,” “Common Sense in the Household,”
Etc._
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
743 AND 745 BROADWAY
1880
COPYRIGHT BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.
1880.
TROW’S
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY,
201-213 EAST 12TH STREET,
NEW YORK.
INTRODUCTION.
WHEN I began the MS. of this book, it was with the intention of
including it in the “Common Sense in the Household Series,” in which
event it was to be entitled, “FAMILIAR TALKS FROM AFAR.”
For reasons that seemed good to my publishers and to me, this purpose
was not carried out, except as it has influenced the tone of the
composition; given to each chapter the character of experiences
remembered and recounted to a few friends by the fireside, rather
than that of a sustained and formal narrative, penned in dignified
seclusion, amid guide-books and written memoranda.
This is the truthful history of the foreign life of an American family
whose main object in “going on a pilgrimage” was the restoration of
health to one of its members. In seeking and finding the lost treasure,
we found so much else which enriched us for all time, that, in the
telling of it, I have been embarrassed by a plethora of materials.
I have described some of the things we wanted to see—as we saw
them,—writing _con amore_, but with such manifold strayings from the
beaten track into by-paths and over moors, and in such homely, familiar
phrase, that I foresee criticism from the disciples of routine and
the sedate students of chronology, topography and general statistics.
I comfort myself, under the prospective infliction, with the belief
which has not played me false in days past,—to wit: that what I have
enjoyed writing some may like to read. I add to this the hope that the
fresh-hearted traveler who dares think and feel for, and of himself, in
visiting the Old World which is to him the New, may find in this record
of how we made it Home to us, practical and valuable hints for the
guidance of his wanderings.
MARION HARLAND.
SPRINGFIELD, MASS., April, 1880.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
The Average Briton, 1
CHAPTER II.
Olla Podrida, 14
CHAPTER III.
Spurgeon and Cummings, 29
CHAPTER IV.
The Two Elizabeths, 39
CHAPTER V.
Prince Guy, 52
CHAPTER VI.
Shakspeare and Irving, 67
CHAPTER VII.
Kenilworth, 84
CHAPTER VIII.
Oxford, 96
CHAPTER IX.
Sky-larks and Stoke-Pogis, 111
CHAPTER X.
Our English Cousins, 121
CHAPTER XI.
Over the Channel, 137
CHAPTER XII.
Versailles—Expiatory Chapel—Père Lachaise, 154
CHAPTER XIII.
Southward Bound, 170
CHAPTER XIV.
Pope, King, and Forum, 183
CHAPTER XV.
On Christmas-Day, 196
CHAPTER XVI.
L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, 216
CHAPTER XVII.
With the Skeletons, 230
CHAPTER XVIII.
“Paul—a Prisoner,” 243
CHAPTER XIX.
Tasso and Tusculum, 258
CHAPTER XX.
From Pompeii to Lake Avernus, 272
CHAPTER XXI.
“A Sorosis Lark,” 293
CHAPTER XXII.
In Florence and Pisa, 308
CHAPTER XXIII.
“Beautiful Venice,” 325
CHAPTER XXIV.
Bologna, 339
CHAPTER XXV.
“Non é Possibile!” 351
CHAPTER XXVI.
Lucerne and The Rigi, 366
CHAPTER XXVII.
Personal and Practical, 379
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Home-life in Geneva—Ferney, 392
CHAPTER XXIX.
Calvin—The Diodati House—Primroses, 408
CHAPTER XXX.
Corinne at Coppet, 419
CHAPTER XXXI.
Chillon, 428
LOITERINGS IN PLEASANT PATHS.
CHAPTER I.
_The Average Briton._
SUNDAY in London: For the first time since our arrival in the city we
saw it under what passes in that latitude and language for sunshine.
For ten days we had dwelt beneath a curtain of gray crape resting upon
the chimney-tops, leaving the pavements dry to dustiness. “Gray crape”
is poetical—rather—and sounds better than the truth, which is, that
the drapery, without fold or shading, over-canopying us, was precisely
in color like very dirty, unbleached muslin, a tint made fashionable
within a year or so, under the name of “Queen Isabella’s linen” (“_le
linge de la Reine Isabeau_”). The fixed cloud depressed and oppressed
us singularly. It was a black screen set above the eyes, which we were
all the while tempted to push up in order to see more clearly and
farther,—a heavy hand upon brain and chest. For the opaqueness, the
clinging rimes of the “London fog,” we were prepared. Of the mysterious
withholding for days and weeks of clouds threatening every minute to
fall, we had never heard. We had bought umbrellas at Sangster’s, as
does every sensible tourist immediately after securing rooms at a
hotel, and never stirred abroad without them; but the pristine plaits
had not been disturbed. Struggle as we might with the notion, we could
not rid ourselves of the odd impression that the whole nation had
gone into mourning. Pleasure-seeking, on the part of sojourners who
respected conventionalities, savored of indecorum. We were more at our
ease in the crypt of St. Paul’s, and among the dead of Westminster
Abbey, than anywhere else, and felt the conclave of murderers, the
blood-flecked faces of the severed heads, the genuine _lunette_ and
knife of Samson’s guillotine in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, to
be “quite the thing in the circumstances.”
The evil, nameless spell was broken by the clangor of the Sabbath
bells. “The _gray_ pavilion rose” and did not fall—for twenty-four
hours. Strolling through St. James’s Park in the hour preceding
sunsetting, we pointed out to one another the pale blue, dappled
with white, of the zenith, the reddening mists of the horizon. The
ground was strewed with autumnal leaves, russet and brown. The subdued
monotony of the two shades of decay did not move us to adverse
criticism. The crimsons, golds, and purples that were robing woods we
knew of over the water, would be incongruous in this sober-hued land.
In the matter of light and color, he who tarries in England in autumn,
winter, and early spring, soon learns to be thankful for small favors.
We were grateful and satisfied. We were in a mood to be in love with
England,—“our old home;” still walked her soil as in a blessed dream,
haunted only by sharp dreads of awakening to the knowledge that the
realization of the hopes, and longings, and imaginings of many years
was made of such stuff as had been our cloud-pictures. We were in
process of an experience we were ashamed to speak of until we learned
how common it was with other voyagers, whose planning and pining had
resembled ours in kind and degree. None of us was willing to say how
much time was given to a comical weighing of the identity question,
somewhat after the fashion of poor Nelly on the roadside in the
moonlight:—If this were England, who then were we? If these pilgrims
were ourselves—veritable and unaltered—could it be true that we were
_here_? If I do not express well what was as vague as tormenting, it is
not because the system of spiritual and mental acclimation was not a
reality.
The Palace of St. James, a range of brick and dinginess, stretched
before us as we returned to the starting-point of the walk around
the park, taking in the Bird-cage Walk, where Charles II. built his
aviaries and lounged, Nelly Gwynne, or the Duchess of Portsmouth, at
his side, a basket of puppies hung over his lace collar and ruffled
cravat. It is not a palatial pile—even to eyes undried from the juice
of Puck’s “little western flower.”
“It would still be a very decent abode for the horses of royalty—hardly
for their grooms,” said Caput, critically. “And it is worth looking at
when one remembers how long bloody Mary lay there, hideous, forsaken,
half dead, the cancerous memories of Calais and Philip’s desertion
consuming her vitals. There lived and died the gallant boy who was the
eldest son of James I. If he had succeeded to the throne his brother
Charles would have worn his head more comfortably and longer upon his
shoulders. That is, unless, as in the case of Henry VIII., the manhood
of the Prince of Wales had belied the promise of early youth.”
“It was in St. James’s Palace that Charles spent his last night,” I
interrupted. It takes a long time for the novice to become accustomed
to the strange thrill that vibrates through soul and nerves when such
reminiscences overtake him, converting the place whereon he stands
into holy ground. I was a novice, and rushed on impetuously. “The
rooms in which he slept and made his toilet for the scaffold were in
the old Manor-house, a wing of the palace since torn down. Why can’t
they let things alone? But the park is here, and—” glancing dubiously
along the avenues—“it is just possible—altogether possible—that some
of these oldest trees may be the same that stood here then. On that
morning, when—you remember?—the ground being covered lightly with snow,
the king walked with a quick step across the park to Whitehall, calling
to the guard, ‘Step on apace, my good fellows!’”
Measuring with careful eye an air line between the palace and a
building with a cupola, on the St. James Street side of the park, we
turned our steps along this. The dying leaves rustled under our feet,
settling sighingly into the path behind us. The “light snow” had
muffled the ring of the “quick step” more like the impatient tread of a
bridegroom than that of a doomed man shortening the already brief space
betwixt him and fate. Within the shadow of Whitehall, we paused.
“The scaffold was built just without the window of the
banqueting-hall,” we reminded each other. “As late as the reign of
William and Mary, the king’s blood was visible upon the window-sill.
Jacobites made great capital of the insensibility of his granddaughter,
who held her drawing-rooms in that very apartment. The crowd must have
been densest about here, and spread far into the park. But how can we
know just where the scaffold stood? It was low, for the people leaped
upon it after the execution and dipped handkerchiefs in the blood,
to be laid away as precious relics. Those windows are rather high!”
glancing helplessly upward. “And which is the banqueting-hall?”
“Baldeker’s London” was then in press for the rescue of the next
season’s traveller from like pits of perplexity. Not having it, and the
“hand-books” we had provided ourselves with proving dumb guides in the
emergency, the simplest and most natural road out of ignorance was to
ask a question or two of some intelligent native-born Londoner.
In this wise, then, we first made the acquaintance of the Average
Briton,—a being who figured almost as often in our subsequent
wanderings as did the travelling American. I do not undertake to say
which was the more ridiculous or vexatious of the two, according as
our purpose at the time of meeting them chanced to be diversion or
information.
The Average Briton of this Sabbath-day was smug and rotund; in
complexion, rubicund; complacent of visage, and a little rolling in
gait, being duck-legged. A child trotted by him upon a pair of limbs
cut dutifully after the paternal pattern, swinging upon the paternal
hand. Upon the other side of the central figure, arrayed in matronly
black silk and a velvet hat with a white plume, walked a lady of whom
Hawthorne has left us a portrait:
“She has an awful ponderosity of frame, not pulpy, like the looser
development of our few fat women, but massive with solid beef and
streaky tallow; so that (though struggling manfully against the
idea) you inevitably think of her as made up of steaks and sirloins.
She imposes awe and respect by the muchness of her personality to
such a degree that you probably credit her with far greater moral
and intellectual force than she can fairly claim. Without anything
positively salient, or actually offensive, or, indeed, unjustly
formidable to her neighbors, she has the effect of a seventy-four gun
ship in time of peace.” I had ample time to remember and to verify each
line of the picture during the parley with her husband that succeeded
our encounter. A citizen of London-town was he. We were so far right
in our premises. One who had attended “divine service” in the morning;
partaken of roast mutton and a pint of half-and-half at an early
dinner; who would presently go home from this stretch of the legs, with
good appetite and conscience to a “mouthful of somethink ’ot with his
tea,” and come up to time with unflagging powers to bread, cheese, cold
meat, pickles, and ale, at a nine o’clock supper. Our old home teems
with such. Heaven send them length of days and more wit!
Caput stepped into the path of the substantial pair; lifted his hat in
recognition of the lady’s presence and apology for the interruption.
“Excuse me, sir—”
I groaned inwardly. Had I not drilled him in the omission of the
luckless monosyllable ever since we saw the Highlands of Navesink melt
into the horizon? How many times had I iterated and reiterated the
adage?—“In England one says ‘sir’ to prince, master, or servant. It is
a confession of inferiority, or an insult.” Nature and (American) grace
were too strong for me.
“Excuse me, sir! But can you tell me just where the scaffold was
erected on which Charles the First was executed?”
The Average Briton stared bovinely. Be sure he did not touch his hat to
me, nor echo the “sir,” nor yet betray how flatteringly it fell upon
his unaccustomed ear. Being short of stature, he stared at an angle of
forty-five degrees to gain his interlocutor’s face, unlocked his shaven
jaws and uttered in a rumbling stomach-base the Shibboleth of his tribe
and nation:
“I really carnt say!”
Caput fell back in good order—_i. e._, raising his hat again to the
Complete British Matron, whose face had not changed by so much as
the twitch of an eyelid while the colloquy was in progress. She paid
no attention whatever to the homage offered to the sex through “the
muchness of her personality,” nor were the creases in her lord’s double
chin deepened by any inclination of his head.
“The fellow is an underbred dolt!” said Caput, looking after them as
they sailed along the walk.
“In that case it is a pity you called him ‘sir,’ and said ‘erected’
and ‘executed,’” remarked I, with excruciating mildness. “Here comes
another! Ask him where King Charles was beheaded.”
No. 2 was smugger and smoother than No. 1. He had silvery
hair and mutton-leg whiskers, and a cable watch-chain trained
over a satin waistcoat, adjuncts which imparted a look of yet
intenser respectability. There was a moral and social flavor of
bank-directorships and alder-manic expectations about him, almost
warranting the “sir” which slipped again from the incorrigible tongue.
We had the same answer to a word and intonation. The formula must be
taught to them over their crib-rails as our babies are drilled to
lisp—“Now I lay me.” Grown reckless and slightly wicked, we accosted
ten others in quick succession in every variety of phraseology, of
which the subject was susceptible, but always to the same effect. Where
stood the scaffold of Charles the First, Charles Stuart, Charles the
Martyr, Charles, father of the Merry Monarch, the grandparent of Mary
of Orange and Good Queen Anne? Could any man of British mould designate
to us the terminus of that quick step over the snowy park on the
morning of the 30th of January, 1649, the next stage to that “which,
though turbulent and troublesome, would be a very short one, yet would
carry him a great way—even from earth to Heaven?”
Eight intelligent Londoners said, “I really carnt say!” more or less
drawlingly. Two answered bluntly, “Dawnt know!” over their shoulders,
without staying or breaking their saunter. Finally, we espied a youth
sitting under a tree—one of those from which the melting snow might
have dropped upon the prisoner’s head—why not the thrifty oak he
had pointed out to Bishop Juxon in nearing Whitehall, as “the tree
planted by my brother Henry?” The youth was neatly dressed, comely of
countenance, and he held an open book, his eyes riveted upon the open
page.
“That looks promising!” ejaculated Caput. There was genuine respect in
his address:
“I beg your pardon for interrupting you, but can you inform me, etc.,
etc.?”
The student raised his head, and looked at us with lacklustre or
abstracted eyes.
“Hey?”
Caput repeated the query distinctly and with emphasis.
“Chawles the First?”
“Yes!” less patiently. “The king whose head was cut off by order of
Cromwell’s parliament, under the windows of Whitehall, in 1649?”
“Never heard of him!” rejoined the countryman of Hume, Macaulay, and
Froude, resuming his studies.
Caput recoiled as from an electric eel. “I wouldn’t have believed it,
had any one else heard and repeated it to me!” gasped he, when out of
ear-shot. “Do you suppose there is a hod-carrier in Boston who does not
know the history of Faneuil Hall?”
“Hundreds! Hod-carriers are usually of foreign birth.”
“Or a school-boy in America who never heard of Arnold’s treason and
André’s fate? Or, for that matter, who cannot, when twelve years old,
tell the whole story of King Charles’s death, even to the ‘Remember!’
as he laid his head upon the block?”
I had a new difficulty to present.
“While you have been catechizing the enlightened British public, I have
been thinking—and I am afraid we are sentimentalizing in the wrong
place. I have harrowing doubts as to this being the real Whitehall.
The palace was burned in the time of William and Mary—or a portion of
it—and but partially rebuilt by Inigo Jones. There is altogether too
much of this to be the genuine article. And it is startlingly modern!”
It was a spacious building, and did not look as if it had a story. The
exterior was stuccoed and smoke-blackened, but the London air would
have dyed it to such complexion in ten years. A belvidere or cupola
finished it above. Beneath this, on the ground-floor, separating the
wings, was an archway leading into St. James Street. The citizens whom
we had questioned had, with the exception of the student, emerged from
or disappeared in this passage from park to thoroughfare. We saw now a
sentinel, in red coat and helmet, turn in his beat up and down under
the arch.
“Is this Old Whitehall?” we asked.
He shook his head without halting.
“Where is it?”
He pointed to a building on the opposite side of the street. It was two
stories—lofty ones—high above the basement. Twenty-one windows shone in
the handsome front. We traversed the arched passage, planted ourselves
upon the sidewalk and gazed, bewildered, at the one-and-twenty windows.
Through which of them had passed the kingly form we seemed to have seen
for ourselves, so familiar were the oval face and pointed beard, the
great eyes darkened all his life long with prophecy of doom? Through
which had been borne the outraged corpse, the bloody drippings staining
the sill? Upon what spot of the pavement trodden by the throng of
Sabbath idlers had fallen the purple rain from a monarch’s heart? For
sweet pity’s sake, had none marked the place by so much as a cross
in the flagging? All else around us bore the stamp of a later age.
Were the apparently venerable walls pointed out by the sentinel the
banqueting-hall where the granddaughter held her court, or was this
Inigo Jones’s (the Inevitable) restoration?
“One might imagine regicide so common a crime in England as not to be
considered worthy of special note!” we grumbled, a strong sense of
injury upon our foiled souls.
Just then down the street strode a policeman, and, at sight of our
puzzled faces, hesitated with an inquiring look. I cheerfully offer my
testimony here to the civility, intelligence, and general benevolence
of the London police. We met them always when we needed their services,
and as invariably found them ready and able to do all we required of
them, sometimes insisting upon going a block out of their way to show
us our route. Perfunctory politeness? It may have been, but it was so
much better than none at all, or surly familiarity! The man to whom we
now addressed ourselves was tall and brawny, with features that lighted
pleasantly in the hearing of our tale of defeat.
“My father used to tell me,” he said, respectful still, but dropping
into the easy conversational strain an exceptionally obliging New
York “Bobby” might use in like circumstances, “that the king was led
out through that window,” indicating, not one of the triple row in
the banqueting-room, but a smaller in a lower and older wing, “and
executed in front of the main hall. Some say the banqueting-chamber was
not burned with the rest of the palace. Others that it was. My father
was inclined to believe that this is the original building. I have
heard him tell the tale over and over until you might have thought
he had been there himself. The Park ran clear up to Old Whitehall
then, you see—where this street is now. The crowd covered all this
ground where we are standing, the soldiers being nearest the scaffold.
_That_ stood, as nearly as I can make out, about _there_!” tapping the
sidewalk with his stick. “A few feet to the right or the left don’t
make much difference, you know, sir. It does seem queer, and a little
sad, there’s not so much as a stone let into the wall, or a bit of an
inscription. But those were rough times, you know.”
“We are very much obliged to you!” Caput said heartily, holding out his
hand, the palm significantly inverted.
The man shook his head. “Not at all, sir! Against the rules of the
force! I have done nothing worth talking about. If my father were
living, now! But people nowadays care less and less for old stories.”
He touched his cap in moving away.
“The truest gentleman we have met this afternoon!” pronounced Caput.
“Now, we will go back into the park, out of this bustle, and think it
all over!”
This had become already a pet phrase and a pet practice with us. The
amateur dramatization, sometimes partially spoken, for the most part
silent, was our way of appropriating and assimilating as our very
own what we saw and learned. It was a family trick, understood among
ourselves. Quiet, freedom from platitudinal queries and comment,
and comparative solitude, were the favorable conditions for fullest
enjoyment of it.
The student was so absorbed in his book—I hope it was history!—as not
to see us when we passed. The sunlight fell aslant upon the dark-red
walls of the old palace, lying low, long, and gloomy, across the end of
the walk. A stiff, dismal place—yet Elizabeth, in all her glory, had
been moderately contented with it. Within a state bed-chamber, yet to
be seen, the equivocal circumstances—or the coincidences interpreted
as equivocal by the faction hostile to the crown,—attending the birth
of the son of James II. and Mary of Modena laid the first stone of the
mass of distrust that in the end crushed the hopes of “The Pretender.”
The “first gentleman of Europe” opened his baby eyes in this vulgar
world under the roof of the house his father had already begun to
consider unfit for a king’s dwelling, and to meditate taxation of
his American colonies for funds with which to build a greater. Queen
Victoria was married in the Chapel of St. James, adjoining the palace.
Upon the mantel of the venerable Presence-chamber are the initials of
Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn, intertwisted in a loving tangle. They
should have been fashioned in wax instead of the sterner substance that
had hardly left the carver’s hand for the place of honor in the royal
drawing-room before the vane of Henry’s affections veered from Anne to
Jane. It is said that he congratulated himself and the new queen upon
the involutions of the cipher that might be read almost as plainly “H.
J.” as “H. A.” So, there it stands—the sad satire upon wedded love that
mocked the eyes of discreet Jane, the one consort who died a natural
death while in possession of his very temporary devotion,—and the two
Katherines who succeeded her.
By contrast with sombre St. James’s, Buckingham Palace is a
meretricious mushroom, scarcely deserving a passing glance. The air
was bland for early November, and we sat upon a bench under a tree
that let slow, faded leaves down upon our heads while we “thought it
all over,” until the gathering glooms in the deep archway, flanked by
sentry-boxes, shaped themselves into a procession of the “born and
died” in the low-browed chambers. To recite their names would be to
give an abstract of the history of the mightiest realm of the earth for
four centuries.
And, set apart by supreme sorrow from his fellows, ever foremost in our
dream-pictures, walked he, who “made trim,” by his own command, “for
his second marriage-day,” hastened through the snowy avenues of the
park to find a pillow for the Lord’s anointed upon the headsman’s block
before the windows of the banqueting-room of Whitehall.