villagers were strewing the floors with fresh rushes....
During the whole of this day I observed the children busily
employed in preparing garlands of such wild flowers as the
beautiful valley produces, for the evening procession, which
commenced at nine, in the following order: The children,
chiefly girls, holding their garlands, paraded through the
village, preceded by the Union band. They then entered the
church, when the three largest garlands were placed on the
altar, and the remaining ones in various parts of the place.
In the procession I observed the 'Opium Eater,' Mr. Barber,
an opulent gentleman residing in the neighbourhood, Mr. and
Mrs. Wordsworth, Miss Wordsworth and Miss Dora Wordsworth.
Wordsworth is the chief supporter of these rustic ceremonies.
The procession over, the party adjourned to the ballroom, a
hayloft at my worthy friend Mr. Bell's (now the Red Lion),
where the country lads and lasses tripped it merrily and
heavily. They called the amusement dancing. I called it
thumping; for he who made the most noise seemed to be
esteemed the best dancer; and on the present occasion I think
Mr. Pooley, the schoolmaster, bore away the palm. Billy
Dawson, the fiddler, boasted to me of having been the
officiating minstrel at this ceremony for the last six and
forty years.... The dance was kept up to a quarter of twelve,
when a livery servant entered and delivered the following
verbal message to Billy: 'Master's respects, and will thank
you to lend him the fiddle-stick.' Billy took the hint, the
Sabbath was at hand, and the pastor of the parish (Sir
Richard le Fleming) had adopted this gentle mode of apprising
the assembled revellers that they ought to cease their
revelry. The servant departed with the fiddle-stick, the
chandelier was removed, and when the village clock struck
twelve not an individual was to be seen out of doors in the
village."
Since then many notices of the Grasmere rush-bearings have been
printed, the most illuminating being that of the Rev. Canon Rawnsley,
1890, now included in one of his several collections of Lake Country
sketches. He calls attention to the presence, among the bearings, of
designs that suggest a Miracle Play connection, as Moses in the
bulrushes, the serpent on a pole, and the harps of David and
Miriam,--emblems which were all in glowing evidence this past summer.
A merry and sympathetic account is given in a ballad of 1864, ascribed
to Mr. Edward Button, formerly the Grasmere schoolmaster:
"In Grasmere's hill-girt valley,
'Tis pleasant to recall
The children of the dalesmen hold
A pretty festival.
* * * * *
"The children of the valley
To this day faithful keep
The custom of their hardy sires
Who in the churchyard sleep.
"For when hot summer's waning,
They to the lake repair
To pull the reeds and lilies white
That grow in plenty there.
"With these, and ferns and mosses,
And flowers of varied dye,
They hasten home, and all day long
Their busy fingers ply.
"Then in the quiet evening,
Ere dew begins to fall,
They range their floral trophies on
The churchyard's low-topped wall.
"There crosses without number,
Of every shape and size,
And wreaths, triangles, crowns, and shields
Appear in flowery guise.
"And verses, too, and mottoes,
Words ta'en from Holy Writ,
And some designs which mock the pen,
We'll call them nondescript.
"But all are glad and happy
Who in the pageant share,
And the urchins with the nondescripts
Are proud as any there.
"And proudly struts each youngster,
When, devices gay in hand,
They round about the village march
To the music of the band.
"Like to a string of rainbows
Appears that cortege bright,
Winding 'mong the crooked lanes
In the golden evening light!
"And coming to the church again
They bear their garlands in,
They fix them round the time-stained fane
While the bells make merry din.
"But hark! before departing
From that house of prayer,
The incense of a grateful hymn
Floats on the quiet air."
The older hymn of St. Oswald--
"They won us peace, Thy saints, O Lord,
Even though, like royal David, they
Smiting and smitten with the sword
Toiled through their mortal day"--
is now followed by a hymn from the pen of Canon Rawnsley, whose genial
notice, as he passed this August along the churchyard wall of
bearings, brought a happy flush to one child-face after another:
"The Rotha streams, the roses blow,
Though generations pass away,
And still our old traditions flow
From pagan past and Roman day.
"Beside the church our poets sleep,
Their spirits mingle with our throng;
They smile to see the children keep
Our ancient feast with prayer and song.
* * * * *
"We too have foes in war to face,
Not yet our land from sin is free.
Lord, give us of St. Oswald's grace
To make us kings and saints to Thee."
The Grasmere rush-bearing, so far as we saw it, was lacking in none of
the traditional features, not even the rain. Yet the gently falling
showers seemed all unheeded by the line of bright-eyed children,
steadfastly propping up on the wall their various tributes. Banners
and crosses and crowns were there, and all the customary emblems.
Among the several harps was one daintily wrought of marguerites; two
little images of Moses reposed in arks woven of flags and grasses; on
a moss-covered lattice was traced in lilies: "Consider the lilies of
the field." The serpent was made of tough green stems, knotted and
twisted together in a long coil about a pole. Geranium, maiden-hair
fern, Sweet William, pansies, daisies, dahlias, asters, fuchsias
mingled their hues in delicate and intricate devices. Among the
decorated perambulators was one all wreathed in heather, with a screen
of rushes rising high behind. Its flower-faced baby was all but hidden
under a strewing of roses more beautiful than any silken robe, and a
wand twined with lilies of the valley swayed unsteadily from his pink
fist. Six little maidens in white and green, holding tall stalks of
rushes, upheld the rush-bearing sheet--linen spun at Grasmere and
woven at Keswick--crossed by blossoming sprays.
The rush-cart, bearing the ribbon-tied bunches of rushes, crowned with
leafy oak-boughs and hung with garlands, belonged especially to
Lancashire, where it has not yet entirely disappeared; indeed a
rush-cart has been seen in recent years taking its way through one of
the most squalid quarters of grimy Manchester; but the rush-sheet, on
which the precious articles of the parish, silver tankards, teapots,
cups, spoons, snuff-boxes, all lent to grace this festival, were
arranged, had really gone out until, in this simplified form, it was
revived a few years ago at Grasmere by lovers of the past. That the
sheet now holds only flowers is due to that same inexorable logic of
events which has brought it about that no longer the whole parish with
cart-loads of rushes, no longer, even, the strong lads and lasses
swinging aloft bunches of rushes and glistening holly boughs, but only
little children ranged in cherubic row along the churchyard wall, and
crowing babies in their go-carts, bring to St. Oswald the tribute of
the summer.
It was from coach-top we caught our farewell glimpse of the charming
scene. The village band, playing the Grasmere rush-bearing march--an
original tune believed to be at least one hundred and fifty years
old--led the way, followed by the gold and crimson banner of the
warrior saint. The rush-sheet, borne by the little queen and her maids
of honour, came after, and then the throng of one hundred or more
children, transforming the street into a garden with the beauty and
sweetness of their bearings. As the procession neared the church, the
bells pealed out "with all their voices," and we drove off under a
sudden pelt of rain, remembering Wordsworth's reference to
"This day, when forth by rustic music led,
The village children, while the sky is red
With evening lights, advance in long array
Through the still churchyard, each with garland gay,
That, carried sceptre-like, o'ertops the head
Of the proud bearer."
Our third rush-bearing we found in Cheshire, on Sunday, August 12. A
morning train from Manchester brought us to Macclesfield--keeping the
Sabbath with its silk-mills closed, and its steep streets nearly
empty--in time for luncheon and a leisurely drive, through occasional
gusts of rain, four miles to the east, up and up, into the old
Macclesfield Forest. This once wild woodland, infested by savage
boars, a lurking-place for outlaws, is now open pasture, grazed over
by cows whose milk has helped to make the fame of Cheshire cheese. But
Forest Chapel still maintains a rite which flourished when the long
since perished trees were sprouts and saplings.
It is a tiny brown church, nested in a hollow of the hills, twelve
hundred feet above the sea. In the moss-crowned porch, whose arch was
wreathed with flowers and grasses, stood the vicar, as we came up,
welcoming the guests of the rush-bearing. For people were panting up
the hill in a continuous stream, mill hands from Macclesfield and
farmer-folk from all the hamlets round. Perhaps seven or eight hundred
were gathered there, hardly one-fourth of whom could find room within
the church.
We passed up the walk, thickly strewn with rushes, under that brightly
garlanded porch, into a little sanctuary that was a very arbour of
greenery and blossom. As we were led up the aisle, our feet sank in a
velvety depth of rushes. The air was delicious with fresh, woodsy
scents. A cross of lilies rose from the rush-tapestried font. The
window-seats were filled with bracken, fern, and goldenrod. The pulpit
and reading-desk were curtained with long sprays of bloom held in
green bands of woven rushes. The chancel walls were hidden by
wind-swayed greens from which shone out, here and there, clustering
harebells, cottage roses, and the golden glint of the sunflower. The
hanging lamps were gay with asters, larkspur, and gorse. The whole
effect was indescribably joyous and rural, frankly suggestive of
festivity.
It was early evensong, a three o'clock service. There was to be
another at five. After the ritual came the full-voiced singing of a
familiar hymn:
"Before the hills in order stood,
Or earth received her frame,
From everlasting Thou art God,
To endless years the same.
* * * * *
"Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day."
So singing, the little congregation filed out into the churchyard,
where the greater congregation, unable to gain access, was singing
too. It was one of the rare hours of sunshine, all the more blissful
for their rarity. The preacher of the day took his stand on a flat
tombstone. Little girls were lifted up to seats upon the churchyard
wall, and coats were folded and laid across low monuments for the
comfort of the old people. A few little boys, on their first emergence
into the sunshine, could not resist the temptation to turn an
unobtrusive somersault or so over the more distant mounds, but they
were promptly beckoned back by their elders and squatted submissively
on the turf. The most of the audience stood in decorous quiet. Two
generations back, gingerbread stalls and all manner of booths would
have been erected about the church, and the rustics, clumping up the
steep path in the new boots which every farmer was expected to give
his men for the rush-bearing, would have diversified the services by
drinking and wrestling.
But altogether still and sacred was the scene on which we looked back
as the compulsion of the railway time-table drew us away; the low
church tower keeping watch and ward over that green enclosure of God's
acre, with the grey memorial crosses and the throng of living
worshippers,--a throng that seemed so shadowy, so evanescent, against
the long memories of Forest Chapel and the longer memories of those
sunlit hills that rejoiced on every side. A yellow rick rose just
behind the wall, the straws blowing in the wind as if they wanted to
pull away and go to church with the rushes. On the further side of the
little temple there towered a giant chestnut, a dome of shining green
that seemed to overspread and shelter its Christian neighbour, as if
in recognition of some ancient kinship, some divine primeval bond,
attested, perhaps, by this very rite of rush-bearing. The enfolding
blue of the sky, tender with soft sunshine, hallowed them both.
A GROUP OF INDUSTRIAL COUNTIES
I. LANCASHIRE
We all know Liverpool,--but how do we know it? The Landing Stage,
hotels whose surprisingly stable floors, broad beds, and fresh foods
are grateful to the sea-worn, the inevitable bank, perhaps the shops.
Most of us arrive at Liverpool only to hurry out of it,--to Chester,
to London, to the Lakes. Seldom do the beguilements of the Head Boots
prevail upon the impatient American to visit the birthplaces of its
two queerly assorted lions, "Mr. Gladstone and Mrs. 'Emans," of whom
the second would surely roar us "as gently as any sucking dove." Yet
we might give a passing thought to these as well as to the
high-hearted James Martineau and to Hawthorne, our supreme artist in
romance, four of whose precious years the country wasted in that
"dusky and stifled chamber" of Brunswick Street. And hours must be
precious indeed to the visitor who cannot spare even one for the
Walker Fine Art Gallery, where hangs Rossetti's great painting of
"Dante's Dream,"--the Florentine, his young face yearning with awe and
grief, led by compassionate Love to the couch of Beatrice, who lies
death-pale amid the flush of poppies.
But the individuality of Liverpool is in its docks,--over six miles of
serried basins hollowed out of the bank of the broad Mersey, one of
the hardest-worked rivers in the world,--wet docks and dry docks,
walled and gated and quayed. From the busiest point of all, the
Landing Stage, the mighty ocean liners draw out with their throngs of
wearied holiday-makers and their wistful hordes of emigrant
home-seekers. And all along the wharves stand merchantmen of infinite
variety, laden with iron and salt, with soap and sugar, with
earthenware and clay, with timber and tobacco, with coal and grain,
with silks and woollens, and, above all, with cotton,--the raw cotton
sent in not only from our own southern plantations, but from India and
Egypt as well, and the returning cargoes of cloth spun and woven in
"the cotton towns" of Lancashire. The life of Liverpool is commerce;
it is a city of warehouses and shops. The wide sea-range and the
ever-plying ferryboats enable the merchant princes to reside well out
of the town. So luxurious is the lot of these merchants deemed to be
that Lancashire has set in opposition the terms "a Liverpool
gentleman" and "a Manchester man," while one of the ruder cotton
towns, Bolton, adds its contribution of "a Bolton chap." This
congestion of life in the great port means an extreme of poverty as
well as of riches. The poor quarters of Liverpool have been called
"the worst slums in Christendom," yet a recent investigation has shown
that within a limited area, selected because of its squalor and
misery, over five thousand pounds a year goes in drink. The families
that herd together by threes and fours in a single dirty cellar,
sleeping on straw and shavings, nevertheless have money to spend at
"the pub,"--precisely the same flaring, gilded ginshop to-day as when
Hawthorne saw and pitied its "sad revellers" half a century ago.
[Illustration: THE QUADRANT, LIVERPOOL]
While Liverpool has a sorry pre-eminence for high death-rate and for
records of vice and crime, Manchester, "the cinder-heap," may
fairly claim to excel in sheer dismalness. The river Irwell, on which
it stands, is so black that the Manchester clerks, as the saying goes,
run down to it every morning and fill their ink-pots. Not only
Manchester, but all the region for ten miles around, is one monster
cotton factory. The towns within this sooty ring--tall-chimneyed
Bolton; Bury, that has been making cloth since the days of Henry VIII;
Middleton on the sable Irk; Rochdale, whose beautiful river is forced
to toil not for cotton only, but for flannels and fustians and
friezes; bustling Oldham; Ashton-under-Lyme, with its whirr of more
than three million spindles; Staley Bridge on the Tame; Stockport in
Cheshire; Salford, which practically makes one town with Manchester;
and Manchester itself--all stand on a deep coal-field. The miners may
be seen, of a Sunday afternoon, lounging at the street corners, or
engaged in their favourite sport of flying carrier pigeons, as if the
element of air had a peculiar attraction for these human gnomes. If
the doves that they fly are white, it is by some special grace, for
smut lies thick on wall and ledge, on the monotonous ranks of
"workingmen's homes," on the costly public buildings, on the
elaborate groups of statuary. One's heart aches for the sculptor whose
dream is hardly made pure in marble before it becomes dingy and
debased.
Beyond the borders of this magic coal-field, above which some dark
enchantment binds all humanity in an intertwisted coil of spinning,
weaving, bleaching, printing, buying, selling cotton, are various
outlying collieries upon which other manufacturing towns are
built,--Warrington, which at the time of our Revolution supplied the
Royal Navy with half its sail-cloth; Wigan, whose tradition goes back
to King Arthur, but whose renown is derived from its seam of cannel
coal; calico Chorley; Preston, of warlike history and still the centre
of determined strikes; and plenty more.
The citizens of the cotton towns are proud of their grimy bit of the
globe, and with good reason. "Rightly understood," said Disraeli,
"Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens." The swift
industrial growth, the vast business expansion of all this region, are
to be counted among the modern miracles of progress, barren of beauty
and joy as their present stage may seem to be. The heroes held in
memory here are plain workingmen whose mechanical inventions resulted
in the English spinning-mill,--John Kay of Bury, James Hargreaves of
Blackburn, Samuel Crompton of Bolton, and Sir Richard Arkwright, a
native of Preston, who began his career as a barber's apprentice and
won his accolade by an energy of genius which virtually created the
cotton manufacture in Lancashire. The battle legends are of angry mobs
and smashed machinery, of garrisoned mills and secret experiments and
inventors in peril of their lives. The St. George of Lancashire is
George Stephenson, the sturdy Scotchman, who in 1830 constructed that
pioneer railway between Liverpool and Manchester,--a road which had to
perform no mean exploit in crossing the quaking bog of Chat Moss.
Fanny Kemble, when a girl of twenty-one, had the ecstasy of a trial
trip with Stephenson himself. She tells with fairy-tale glamour how
"his tame dragon flew panting along his iron pathway" at "its utmost
speed, thirty-four miles an hour, swifter than a bird flies." Wonder
of wonders, this "brave little she-dragon" could "run with equal
facility backwards or forwards." This trip took place at the end of
August, preliminary to the final opening on September fifteenth, an
occasion whose triumph was marred by a fatal mischance, in that a
stray dragon ran over a director who was innocently standing on the
track. For a patron saint of to-day, Manchester need go no further
than to the founder of the Ancoats Brotherhood, Charles Rowley, that
cheery philanthropist reminding one of Hawthorne's friend who
brightened the dreary visages he met "as if he had carried a sunbeam
in his hand"; for the disciples of the Beautiful, the followers of the
Golden Rule, are full of courage even here among what the poet Blake
would designate as "dark Satanic mills." From out the dirt and din,
shrieking engines, roaring furnaces, clattering machinery, chimneys
belching smoke by day and flame by night, blithely rises the song of
their Holy War:
"I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."
But this, though the modern reality of South Lancashire, is not what
the tourist goes out to see. From Liverpool to Furness Abbey is his
natural and joyful route. He steams at full speed up this richest, most
prosperous, and well-nigh most unattractive part of England; he has
left the Mersey, the county's southern boundary, far behind; he crosses
the Ribble, which flows through the centre of Lancashire, and the Lune,
which enters it from Westmoreland on the north and soon empties into
Morecambe Bay. He has come from a district close-set with factory
towns, scarred with mine shafts and slag heaps, into the sweet quietude
of an agricultural and pastoral region. But still above and beyond him
is Furness, that northernmost section of Lancashire lying between
Cumberland and Westmoreland and shut off from the rest of the county by
Morecambe Bay and the treacherous Lancaster sands. High Furness is a
part of the Lake Country, claiming for Lancashire not only Coniston
Lake but even one side of Windermere, which lies on the Westmoreland
border. Its Cumberland boundary is the sonneted Duddon. Low Furness,
the peninsula at the south of this isolated strip, has a wealth of
mineral deposits, especially iron. The town Barrow-in-Furness, which
in 1846 consisted of a single hut, with one fishing-boat in the
harbour, has been converted, by the development of the mines, into a
place of much commercial consequence. Yet the lover of poetry will
visit it, not for its steel works, figuring so tragically in Mrs.
Humphry Ward's "Helbeck of Bannisdale," nor for its shipbuilding yards
and boasted floating docks, nor for the paper works which take in a
tree at one end and put it out as boxes of dainty stationery at the
other, but in order to reach, by a boat from Peele Pier, Wordsworth's
Peele Castle, "standing here sublime,"--that old island fortress which
the poet's dream has glorified with
"The light that never was on sea or land."
But it is to Furness Abbey that the throngs of sightseers come, and
well they may. Its melancholy grace is one of the treasures of memory.
It was thither that Wordsworth as a schoolboy--for Hawkshead is within
the limits of Furness--would sometimes ride with his fellows. The
"Prelude" holds the picture, as he saw it over a century ago, of
"the antique walls
Of that large abbey, where within the Vale
Of Nightshade, to St. Mary's honour built,
Stands yet a mouldering pile with fractured arch,
Belfry, and images, and living trees;
A holy scene! Along the smooth green turf
Our horses grazed. To more than inland peace
Left by the west wind sweeping overhead
From a tumultuous ocean, trees and towers
In that sequestered valley may be seen,
Both silent and both motionless alike;
Such the deep shelter that is there, and such
The safeguard for repose and quietness."