_Sky-larks and Stoke-Pogis._
THE only really hot weather we felt in the British Isles fell to
our lot at Brighton. The fashionable world was “up in London.” The
metropolis is always “up,” go where you will. “The season” takes in
July, then everybody stays in the country until after Christmas,
usually until April. Benighted Americans exclaim at the unreason of
this arrangement, and are told—“It is customary.”
“But you lose the glory of Spring and Summer; and muddy (_Anglicé_,
‘dirty’) roads and wintry storms must be a serious drawback to country
pleasures. We think the American plan more sensible and comfortable.”
“It is not customary with us.”
With the Average Briton, and with multitudes who are above the average
in intelligence and breeding, “custom” is an end of all controversy.
For one week of the two we spent in Brighton, it was unequivocally
_hot_. The sea was a burnished mirror between the early morning and
evening hours. The Parade and the Links were deserted; the donkey-boys
and peripatetic minstrels retired discouraged from the sultry streets.
We had a pleasant suite of rooms upon Regency Square and kept tolerably
comfortable by lowering the awning of the front balcony and opening
all the inner doors and windows to invite the breeze. Our landlord
had been a butler in Lord Somebody’s family for twenty-eight years;
had married the housekeeper, and with their joint savings and legacies
leased the “four-story brick,” No. 60 Regency Square, and kept a
first-class lodging-house. Every morning, at nine o’clock, he appeared
with slate and pencil for orders for the day. “Breakfast,” “Luncheon,”
“Dinner” were written above as many spaces, and beneath each I made out
a bill-of-fare. Meals were served to the minute in the back-parlor and
the folding-doors, opened by his august hand, revealed him in black
coat and white necktie, ready to wait at table. Cookery and service
were excellent; the rooms handsomely furnished, including napery,
china, silver, and gas. We paid as much as we would have done at a
hotel, but were infinitely more contented, having the privacy and many
of the comforts of a real home.
Our worthy landlord remonstrated energetically at sight of the open
windows; protested against the draughts and our practice of drawing
reading-chairs and lounges into the cooling currents.
“The wind is east, sir!” he said to Caput, almost with tears,—“and when
it sets in that quarter, draughts are deadly.”
We laughed, thanked him and declared that we were used to east winds,
and continued to seek the breeziest places until every one of us was
seized with influenza viler than any that ever afflicted us in the
middle of a Northern winter. Upon Caput, the most robust of the party,
it settled most grievously. The dregs were an attack of bronchitis that
defied all remedies for a month, then sent him back to the Continent
for cure. I mention this instance of over-confidence in American
constitutions and ignorance of the English climate as a warning to
others as rash and unlearned.
The wind stayed in the east all the time we were in Brighton and the
sun’s ardor did not abate. Our host had a good library,—a rarity in a
lodging-house, and we “lazed” away noon-tides, book or fancy-work in
hand. We had morning drives into the country and evening rambles in the
Pavilion Park, and out upon the splendid pier where the band played
until ten o’clock, always concluding, as do all British bands, the
world around, with “GOD save the Queen.” Boy, attended by the devoted
Invaluable, divided the day between donkey-rides, playing in the
sand,—getting wet through regularly twice _per diem_, by an in-rolling
wave,—and the Aquarium. The latter resort was much affected by us all.
It is of itself worth far more than the trouble and cost of a trip from
London to Brighton and back.
The restfulness,—the indolence, if you will have it so—of that sojourn
in a place where there were few “sights,” and when it was too warm
to make a business of visiting such as there were, was a salutary
break,—barring the influenza—in our tour. Perhaps our mental digestions
are feebler or slower than those of the majority of traveling
Americans. But it was a positive necessity for us to be quiet, now
and then, for a week or a month, that the work of assimilation and
nourishment might progress safely and healthfully. After a score of
attempts to bolt an art-gallery, a museum, a cathedral, or a city at
one meal, and to follow this up by rapidly successive surfeits, we
learned wisdom from the dyspeptic horrors that ensued, and resigned
the experiment to others. Nor did we squander time and strength upon a
thing to which we were indifferent, merely because Murray or Baedeker
prescribed it, or through fear of that social nuisance, the Thorough
Traveler. We cultivated a fine obtuseness to the attacks of this
personage and never lost an hour’s sleep for his assurance that the
one thing worth seeing in Munich was the faïence in a tumbling-down
palace only known to virtuosos “who understood the ropes,” and which
we, being simple folk unversed in rope-pulling, had not beheld; or
that he who omitted to walk the entire length of the Liverpool Docks,
or to see the Giant’s Causeway by moonlight, or to go into the Blue
Grotto, might better have stayed at home and given his ticket and
letter-of-credit to a more appreciative voyager.
Our fortnight at Brighton, then, was one of our resting-spells, and one
morning, after a night-shower had freshened the atmosphere, and the
wind blew steadily but not too strongly from the sea, we drove, _en
famille_, to the Downs and the Devil’s Dyke, a deep ravine cleaving the
Downs into two hills. The devil’s name is a pretty sure guarantee of
the picturesque or awful in scenery,—a sort of trade-mark. Our course
was through the open, breezy country; the road, fringed and frilled
with milk-white daisies and scarlet poppies, overlooking the ocean
on one side, bounded upon the other by corn-fields and verdant downs
stretching up and afar into the hilly horizon. The evenness of the
grass upon these rolling heights, and of the growth of wheat and oats
was remarkable, betokening uniformity of fertility and culture unknown
in our country. Wheat, oats, barley—all bearded cereals—are “corn”
abroad, maize being little known.
Leaving the waggonette at the hotel on the top of the Downs, and
turning a deaf ear to the charming of the photographer, whose camera
and black cloth were already afield, early in the day as it was, we
walked on the ridge for an hour. We trod the springy turf as upon
a flowery carpet; the air was balm and cordial; from our height we
surveyed five of the richest counties of England, seeming to be spread
upon a plane surface, the distance leveling minor inequalities.
Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire were a mottled map below our plateau, a
string of hamlets marking highways and knotting up, once in a while,
into a larger settlement wound about a church. Some of these were very
primitive sanctuaries, with thatched roofs and towers, and the straw
gables of the cottages were like so many embrowned hay-ricks.
Then and there, our feet deep in wild thyme and a hundred unknown
blossoming grasses, the pastoral panorama unrolled for our vision, from
the deep blue sea-line to the faint boundary of the far-off hills,
the scented breezes filling lungs that panted to inhale yet larger
draughts of their cool spiciness—we first heard the larks sing! We
had been sceptical about the sky-lark. And since hearing the musical
“jug-jug” and broken _cadenzas_ of Italian nightingales, and deciding
that the mocking-bird would be a triumphantly-successful rival could
he be induced to give moonlight concerts, we had waxed yet more
contemptuous of the bird who builds upon the ground, yet is fabled to
sing at heaven’s gate. We had seen imported larks, brown, spiritless
things, pecking in a home-sickly way at a bit of turf in the corner
of their cage, and emitting an infrequent “tweet.” Our hedge-sparrow
is a comelier and more interesting bird, and, for all we could see,
might sing as well, if he would but apply his mind to the study of the
sustained warble.
Our dear friend, Dr. V——, of Rome, once gave me a description of the
serenades of the nightingales about his summer home on the Albanian
Hills, so exquisite in wording, so pulsing with natural poetry as to
transcend the song of any Philomel we ever listened to. I wished for
him on the Downs that fervid July morning. I wish for his facile pen
the more now when I would tell, and cannot, how the sky-larks sang and
with what emotions we hearkened to them. They arose, not singly or in
pairs, but by the score, from the expanse of enameled turf, mounting
straight and slowly heavenward. Their notes blended in the upper air
into a vibrating ecstasy of music. Pure as the odor of the thyme, free
as the rush of the sea-air over the heights, warble and trill floated
down to us as they soared, always directly up, up, until literally
invisible to the naked eye. I brought the field-glass to bear upon two
I had thus lost, and saw them sporting in the ether like butterflies,
springing and sinking, tossing over and over upon the waves of their
own melody, and, all the while, the lower air in which we stood was
thrilling as clearly and deliciously with rapturous rivulets of sound
as when they were scarce twenty feet above the earth.
Our last memory of Oxford is a landscape—in drawing, graphic and clear
as a Millais, rich and mellow as a Claude in coloring. We brought away
both picture and poem from Brighton Downs.
It was still summer-time, but summer with a presage of autumn in
russet fields and shortening twilights, when we left the railway train
at Slough, a station near Windsor Castle, and took a carriage for
Stoke-Pogis. This, the “Country Church-yard” of Thomas Gray, is but two
and a half miles from the railway, and is gained by a good road winding
between hedge-rows and coppices, with frequent views of quiet country
homes. The flag flaunting from the highest tower of Windsor was seldom
out of sight on the route.
“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave.”
It was impossible to abstain from repeating the couplet, inevitable
that it should recur to us, a majestic refrain, at each glimpse of the
royal standard. We stopped in the broad shadow of a clump of oaks at
the side of the road; passed through a turn-stile and followed a worn
foot-path across the fields. The glimmer of a pale, graceful spire
among the trees was our guide. About sixty yards beyond the stile
is an oblong monument of granite, surmounted by a sarcophagus with
steeply-slanting sides and a gabled cover. The paneled sides of the
base are covered with selections from Gray’s poems. The turf slopes
from this into a shallow moat, on the outer bank of which reclined two
boys. They were well-favored fellows, dressed in well-made jackets and
trousers, and had, altogether, the air of gentlemen’s sons. While one
copied into a blank book the inscription on the side nearest him, his
companion was at work upon a tolerable sketch of the monument.
“Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell forever laid
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,”
read Caput from the monument. Then, glancing at the sarcophagus:
“Can Gray himself be buried here? I thought his grave was in the
church-yard?”
The boys wrote and sketched on, deaf and dumb. Caput approached the
elder, who may have been fifteen years old.
“I beg your pardon! but can you tell me if this is the burial-place of
the poet Gray?”
The lads looked at each other.
“Gray?” said one—
“Poet?” the other.
Then—this is solemn truth, dear Reader!—both uttered, with the unison
and monotony of a church-response—“I really carn’t say!”
We pursued the little foot-path to the church. There would surely be
some record there to satisfy our query. Stones should have tongues
upon the soil that produces the Average Briton. “The summer’s late
repentant smile” cast a pensive beauty over the country-side, made of
the sequestered church-yard a home fair to see and to be desired when
the “inevitable hour” should come. The wall has a luxuriant coping of
ivy throughout its length. Prehensile streamers have anchored in the
turf below and bound the graves with green withes. The ivy-mantle of
the old square tower leaves not a stone visible except where it has
been cut away from the window of the belfry. A new steeple rises out
of the green mass. A modest and symmetrical pinnacle, but one that
displeases prejudice, if not just taste, and which is as yet shunned by
the ivy, that congener of honorable antiquity. It clings nowhere more
lovingly than to the double gable, under the oriel window of which is
the poet’s grave. This is a brick parallelogram covered by a marble
slab. Gray’s mother is buried with him. A tablet in the church-wall
tells us in which narrow cell he sleeps.
Just across the central alley the sexton was opening an old grave,
probably that it might receive another tenant, possibly to remove the
remains to another cemetery. A gentleman in clerical dress stood near,
with two young girls. The grave-digger and his assistant completed the
group. Caput applied to the clergyman, rightly supposing him to be the
parish rector, for permission to gather some of the pink thyme and
grasses from the base of the brick tomb. During the minute occupied by
courteous question and reply, the contents of the grave were exposed to
view.
“A ‘mouldering heap’ of dust!” said Caput, coming back to us, “Here and
there a crumbling bone. A mat of human hair. Not even the semblance of
human shape. That is what mortality means. Gray may have seen the like
in this very place.”
We picked buttercups, clover, and thyme, some blades of grass and
sprigs of moss, that had their roots in the fissures of the bricks, and
as silently quitted the vicinage of the open pit. Every step furnished
proof of the fidelity to nature of the imperishable idyl. It was an
impossibility—or so we then believed—that it could have been written
elsewhere than in that “church-yard.” The moveless arabesques of the
rugged elm-boughs slept upon the ridged earth at our left; the yew-tree
blackened a corner at the right. The “upland lawn” was bathed in
sunshine; the
“nodding beech
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,”
at whose foot the recluse stretched his listless length at noontide,
still leaned over the brook. We stayed our lingering steps to listen to
its babbling, and point out the wood and the “’customed hill.”
We rode back to the station by way of the hamlet, into whose uncouth
name genius has breathed music, and saw Gray’s home. It is a plain,
substantial dwelling, little better than a farm-house. In the garden
is a summer-house, in which, it is said, he was fond of sitting
while he wrote and read. Constitutionally shy, and of exceeding
delicacy of nerve and taste, his thoughtfulness deepened by habitual
ill-health,—one comprehends, in seeing Stoke-Pogis, why he should have
preferred it to any other abode, yet how, in this seclusion, gravity
and dreaming should have become a gentle melancholy tingeing every line
we have from his pen. As, when apostrophizing Eton:—
“Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shades!
Ah, fields, beloved in vain!
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
A _stranger yet to pain_.”
This continual guest, Pain, engendered an indolent habit of body. His
ideal Heaven was “where one might lie on the sofa all day and read a
novel,” unstung by conscience or the contempt of his kind.
“William Penn was born at Stoke-Pogis!” I remembered, aloud and
abruptly.
Caput’s eyes were upon the fast-vanishing spire:
“The Elegy—in which I defy any master of English to find a misapplied
word—was written twenty times before it was printed,” he observed
sententiously.
“_Papa!_” from the young lady on the back seat of the carriage—“Now, I
thought it was an impromptu——”
“Dashed off upon the backs of a pocketful of letters, between daylight
and dark, a flat grave-stone for a desk,—and published in the next
morning’s issue of the ‘Stoke-Pogis Banner of Light!’” finished the
senior, banteringly.
But there is a lesson, with a moral, in the brief dialogue.