Yesterday, July 12th, we took a phaeton and went to Furness Abbey,--a
drive of about sixteen miles, passing along the course of the Leam to
Morecambe Bay, and through Ulverton and other villages. These villages
all look antique, and the smallest of them generally are formed of such
close, contiguous clusters of houses, and have such narrow and crooked
streets, that they give you an idea of a metropolis in miniature. The
houses along the road (of which there are not many, except in the
villages) are almost invariably old, built of stone, and covered with a
light gray plaster; generally they have a little flower-garden in front,
and, often, honeysuckles, roses, or some other sweet and pretty rustic
adornment, are flowering over the porch. I have hardly had such images
of simple, quiet, rustic comfort and beauty, as from the look of these
houses; and the whole impression of our winding and undulating road,
bordered by hedges, luxuriantly green, and not too closely clipped,
accords with this aspect. There is nothing arid in an English landscape;
and one cannot but fancy that the same may be true of English rural life.
The people look wholesome and well-to-do,--not specimens of hard, dry,
sunburnt muscle, like our yeomen,--and are kind and civil to strangers,
sometimes making a little inclination of the head in passing. Miss
Martineau, however, does not seem to think well of their mental and moral
condition.
We reached Furness Abbey about twelve. There is a railway station close
by the ruins; and a new hotel stands within the precincts of the abbey
grounds; and continually there is the shriek, the whiz, the rumble, the
bell-ringing, denoting the arrival of the trains; and passengers alight,
and step at once (as their choice may be) into the refreshment-room, to
get a glass of ale or a cigar,--or upon the gravelled paths of the lawn,
leading to the old broken walls and arches of the abbey. The ruins are
extensive, and the enclosure of the abbey is stated to have covered a
space of sixty-five acres. It is impossible to describe them. The most
interesting part is that which was formerly the church, and which, though
now roofless, is still surrounded by walls, and retains the remnants of
the pillars that formerly supported the intermingling curves of the
arches. The floor is all overgrown with grass, strewn with fragments and
capitals of pillars. It was a great and stately edifice, the length of
the nave and choir having been nearly three hundred feet, and that of the
transept more than half as much. The pillars along the nave were
alternately a round, solid one and a clustered one. Now, what remains of
some of them is even with the ground; others present a stump just high
enough to form a seat; and others are, perhaps, a man's height from the
ground,--and all are mossy, and with grass and weeds rooted into their
chinks, and here and there a tuft of flowers, giving its tender little
beauty to their decay. The material of the edifice is a soft red stone,
and it is now extensively overgrown with a lichen of a very light gray
line, which, at a little distance, makes the walls look as if they had
long ago been whitewashed, and now had partially returned to their
original color. The arches of the nave and transept were noble and
immense; there were four of them together, supporting a tower which has
long since disappeared,--arches loftier than I ever conceived to have
been made by man. Very possibly, in some cathedral that I have seen, or
am yet to see, there may be arches as stately as these; but I doubt
whether they can ever show to such advantage in a perfect edifice as they
do in this ruin,--most of them broken, only one, as far as I recollect,
still completing its sweep. In this state they suggest a greater majesty
and beauty than any finished human work can show; the crumbling traces of
the half-obliterated design producing somewhat of the effect of the first
idea of anything admirable, when it dawns upon the mind of an artist or a
poet,--an idea which, do what he may, he is sure to fall short of in his
attempt to embody it.
In the middle of the choir is a much-dilapidated monument of a
cross-legged knight (a crusader, of course) in armor, very rudely
executed; and, against the wall, lie two or three more bruised and
battered warriors, with square helmets on their heads and visors down.
Nothing can be uglier than these figures; the sculpture of those days
seems to have been far behind the architecture. And yet they knew how to
put a grotesque expression into the faces of their images, and we saw
some fantastic shapes and heads at the lower points of arches which would
do to copy into Punch. In the chancel, just at the point below where the
high altar stands, was the burial-place of the old Barons of Kendal. The
broken crusader, perhaps, represents one of them; and some of their
stalwart bones might be found by digging down. Against the wall of the
choir, near the vacant space where the altar was, are some stone seats
with canopies richly carved in stone, all quite perfectly preserved,
where the priests used to sit at intervals, during the celebration of
mass. Conceive all these shattered walls, with here and there an arched
door, or the great arched vacancy of a window; these broken stones and
monuments scattered about; these rows of pillars up and down the nave;
these arches, through which a giant might have stepped, and not needed to
bow his head, unless in reverence to the sanctity of the place,--conceive
it all, with such verdure and embroidery of flowers as the gentle, kindly
moisture of the English climate procreates on all old things, making them
more beautiful than new,--conceive it with the grass for sole pavement of
the long and spacious aisle, and the sky above for the only roof. The
sky, to be sure, is more majestic than the tallest of those arches; and
yet these latter, perhaps, make the stronger impression of sublimity,
because they translate the sweep of the sky to our finite comprehension.
It was a most beautiful, warm, sunny day, and the ruins had all the
pictorial advantage of bright light and deep shadows. I must not forget
that birds flew in and out among the recesses, and chirped and warbled,
and made themselves at home there. Doubtless, the birds of the present
generation are the posterity of those who first settled in the ruins,
after the Reformation; and perhaps the old monks of a still earlier day
may have watched them building about the abbey, before it was a ruin at
all.
We had an old description of the place with us, aided by which we traced
out the principal part of the edifice, such as the church, as already
mentioned, and, contiguous to this, the Chapter-house, which is better
preserved than the church; also the kitchen, and the room where the monks
met to talk; and the range of wall, where their cells probably were. I
never before had given myself the trouble to form any distinct idea of
what an abbey or monastery was,--a place where holy rites were daily and
continually to be performed, with places to eat and sleep contiguous and
convenient, in order that the monks might always be at hand to perform
those rites. They lived only to worship, and therefore lived under the
same roof with their place of worship, which, of course, was the
principal object in the edifice, and hallowed the whole of it. We
found, too, at one end of the ruins, what is supposed to have been a
school-house for the children of the tenantry or villeins of the abbey.
All round this room is a bench of stone against the wall, and the
pedestal also of the master's seat. There are, likewise, the ruins of
the mill; and the mill-stream, which is just as new as ever it was, still
goes murmuring and babbling, and passes under two or three old bridges,
consisting of a low gray arch overgrown with grass and shrubbery. That
stream was the most fleeting and vanishing thing about the ponderous and
high-piled abbey; and yet it has outlasted everything else, and might
still outlast another such edifice, and be none the worse for wear.
There is not a great deal of ivy upon the walls, and though an ivied wall
is a beautiful object, yet it is better not to have too much,--else it is
but one wall of unbroken verdure, on which you can see none of the
sculptural ornaments, nor any of the hieroglyphics of Time. A sweep of
ivy here and there, with the gray wall everywhere showing through, makes
the better picture; and I think that nothing is so effective as the
little bunches of flowers, a mere handful, that grow in spots where the
seeds have been carried by the wind ages ago.
I have made a miserable botch of this description; it is no description,
but merely an attempt to preserve something of the impression it made on
me, and in this I do not seem to have succeeded at all. I liked the
contrast between the sombreness of the old walls, and the sunshine
falling through them, and gladdening the grass that floored the aisles;
also, I liked the effect of so many idle and cheerful people, strolling
into the haunts of the dead monks, and going babbling about, and peering
into the dark nooks; and listening to catch some idea of what the
building was from a clerical-looking personage, who was explaining it to
a party of his friends. I don't know how well acquainted this gentleman
might be with the subject; but he seemed anxious not to impart his
knowledge too extensively, and gave a pretty direct rebuff to an honest
man who ventured an inquiry of him. I think that the railway, and the
hotel within the abbey grounds, add to the charm of the place. A
moonlight solitary visit might be very good, too, in its way; but I
believe that one great charm and beauty of antiquity is, that we view it
out of the midst of quite another mode of life; and the more perfectly
this can be done, the better. It can never be done more perfectly than
at Furness Abbey, which is in itself a very sombre scene, and stands,
moreover, in the midst of a melancholy valley, the Saxon name of which
means the Vale of the Deadly Nightshade.
The entrance to the stable-yard of the hotel is beneath a pointed arch of
Saxon architecture, and on one side of this stands an old building,
looking like a chapel, but which may have been a porter's lodge. The
Abbot's residence was in this quarter; and the clerical personage, before
alluded to, spoke of these as the oldest part of the ruins.
About half a mile on the hither side of the abbey stands the village of
Dalton, in which is a castle built on a Roman foundation, and which was
afterwards used by the abbots (in their capacity of feudal lords) as a
prison. The abbey was founded about 1027 by King Stephen, before he came
to the throne; and the faces of himself and of his queen are still to be
seen on one of the walls.
We had a very agreeable drive home (our drive hither had been
uncomfortably sunny and hot), and we stopped at Ulverton to buy a pair of
shoes for J----- and some drawing-books and stationery. As we passed
through the little town in the morning, it was all alive with the bustle
and throng of the weekly market; and though this had ceased on our
return, the streets still looked animated, because the heat of the day
drew most of the population, I should imagine, out of doors. Old men
look very antiquated here in their old-fashioned coats and breeches,
sunning themselves by the wayside.
We reached home somewhere about eight o'clock,--home I see I have called
it; and it seems as homelike a spot as any we have found in England,--the
old inn, close by the bridge, beside the clear river, pleasantly
overshadowed by trees. It is entirely English, and like nothing that one
sees in America; and yet. I feel as if I might have lived here a long
while ago, and had now come back because I retained pleasant
recollections of it. The children, too, make themselves at home. J-----
spends his time from morning to night fishing for minnows or trout, and
catching nothing at all, and U---- and R----- have been riding between
fields and barn in a hay-cart. The roads give us beautiful walks along
the river-side, or wind away among the gentle hills; and if we had
nothing else to look at in these walks, the hedges and stone fences would
afford interest enough, so many and pretty are the flowers, roses,
honeysuckles, and other sweet things, and so abundantly does the moss and
ivy grow among the old stones of the fences, which would never have a
single shoot of vegetation on them in America till the very end of time.
But here, no sooner is a stone fence built, than Nature sets to work to
make it a part of herself. She adopts it and adorns it, as if it were
her own child. A little sprig of ivy may be seen creeping up the side,
and clinging fast with its many feet; a tuft of grass roots itself
between two of the stones, where a little dust from the road has been
moistened into soil for it: a small bunch of fern grows in another such
crevice; a deep, soft, green moss spreads itself over the top and all
along the sides of the fence; and wherever nothing else will grow,
lichens adhere to the stones and variegate their lines. Finally, a great
deal of shrubbery is sure to cluster along its extent, and take away all
hardness from the outline; and so the whole stone fence looks as if God
had had at least as much to do with it as man. The trunks of the trees,
too, exhibit a similar parasitical vegetation. Parasitical is an unkind
phrase to bestow on this beautiful love and kindness which seems to exist
here between one plant and another; the strong thing--being always ready
to give support and sustenance, and the weak thing to repay with beauty,
so that both are the richer,--as in the case of ivy and woodbine,
clustering up the trunk of a tall tree, and adding Corinthian grace to
its lofty beauty.
Mr. W------, our landlord, has lent us a splendid work with engravings,
illustrating the antiquities of Furness Abbey. I gather from it that the
hotel must have been rebuilt or repaired from an old manor-house, which
was itself erected by a family of Prestons, after the Reformation, and
was a renewal from the Abbot's residence. Much of the edifice probably,
as it exists now, may have been part of the original one; and there are
bas-reliefs of Scripture subjects, sculptured in stone, and fixed in the
wall of the dining-room, which have been there since the Abbot's time.
This author thinks that what we had supposed to be the school-house (on
the authority of an old book) was really the building for the reception
of guests, with its chapel. He says that the tall arches in the church
are sixty feet high. The Earl of Burlington, I believe, is the present
proprietor of the abbey.