_THE VALE OF HEALTH._
From Hampstead Heath Station a branch of the East Heath Road leads direct
to this popular and well-known part of the Lower Heath, while innumerable
pathlets traced by the feet of visitors impatient to reach the goal of
their pilgrimage all trend in the same direction.
The present name of the Vale dates back to the period of the wells
fashion, a period when sheltered places were believed to be more
conducive to health than more open ones, especially for invalids.
When the fame of Dr. Gibbon’s ‘Fountain of Health’ brought many visitors
to Hampstead, quite a crop of small dwellings rose in this vicinity to
meet the needs of a class of invalids unable, or indisposed, to put up at
the taverns, or the ‘Wells Dwelling-house,’ or in the then fashionable
lodging-houses in Pond Street and the Lower Flask Walk.
Upon the decline of the wells in public estimation, and the consequent
falling-off in the number of visitors, many of these easily-run-up
habitations (mostly weather-boarded cottages) disappeared. But of the few
that survived till quite modern times, some of them, as we shall see,
have had remarkable tenants.
The little cluster of cottages upon the margin of the pool in the
bottom of the Vale constituted the headquarters of the craft which made
the greater part of the population of Hampstead in Tudor times—the
laundresses, who washed the linen of the Court and gentry and of the
chief City merchants and citizens, abundance of water, dry breezy air,
and unlimited bleaching and drying ground, making a very paradise for the
suddy sisterhood.
These privileges were possessed by their successors for many years after
I first knew Hampstead, who made it appear in the early half of each week
as if the grassy spaces between the turf-grown gravel ‘hills and holes,’
as children called them, and all the level growing beds of whortleberry,
and coverts of furze, belonged to them.
It was not unpleasing to an idle observer to watch the bringing up from
the Vale of the great bucking-baskets of fresh-washed linen by the
youngest and strongest of the _lavandières_, to give them their prettiest
appellation, fresh-cheeked, full-chested, large-armed lassies, with
elf-locks blowing about their faces, who soon made a wide part of the
Heath appear as if an army were about to picnic there.
As time went on, the proprietors of these cottages (marked on the map of
the Ordnance Survey as ‘Grottoes and arbours’) developed the sensible
idea of providing in a humble way for the refreshment of the many
summer-afternoon visitors to the lovely village, and preserved in my time
the tradition of the tea and bun houses with which Hampstead had formerly
been too abundantly provided. A humble guild, with no better properties
than deal tables and benches, coarse white or coloured ware, of which
there used to be great piles, and clean tablecloths for the first
comers. The knives, when required, were bone-handled, and blunt; and
the spoons—well, sensitive persons used to wash them in the slop-basin,
and dry them surreptitiously on the edge of the tablecloth. It was not
exactly Frascati’s,[182] but it was a pleasant picture in its way of
homely, hearty enjoyment, and the crowning joy of many a girl and boy’s
afternoon holiday on Hampstead Heath.
One of them, rather an old boy now, has told me that, after an
independent _excursus_ in Bishop’s Wood, a general exploration of the
Heath, a game of hide-and-seek with his sisters among the gravel-pits,
and a donkey-ride from the Whitestone Pond to the Spaniards and back
again, or from the same starting-point round the West Heath to Jack
Straw’s Castle and the Whitestone Pond, few things could be more
pleasantly suggestive than the fuming chimneys in the hollow of the
Vale of Health, and the near sight of the several tables with big
family teapots, flanked by heaped-up plates of serviceable slices of
bread-and-butter (delicious after the ‘crug’ of Christ’s School), and
new-laid eggs, and water-cresses from the spring, which made the general
menu of these al-fresco entertainments.
It was not unusual on summer evenings to see the whole space in front of
these cottages thronged with respectably-dressed family and other parties
taking tea in the open, and enlivening the placid scene with social
gaiety.
It was with the hope of alluring a portion of this company, and the
expected crowds which the opening of the North London Railway promised,
that the East Heath Tavern intruded its gaunt ugliness upon this peaceful
spot, a speculation that ultimately failed.
As the only place on Hampstead Heath outside the taverns where in the
forties and fifties a cup of tea could be had, or hungry folk find
refreshment for their children or themselves, the Vale of Health was well
known and appreciated. But its higher claims to be regarded and sought
out and visited, I think, as a rule, the general inhabitants of the town
of Hampstead had forgotten or ignored.
Neither William Howitt, Baines, nor a writer in the _Bookman_—who in
1893, 1894, and 1895 contributed some notices of Hampstead to that
publication—appears to have known anything decided of the whereabouts of
Leigh Hunt’s cottage, otherwise than that it was situated in the Vale of
Health. The desire on all sides appears to have been to furnish the poet
with a more important habitation than he himself tells us he occupied.
In or about 1855-56, it was believed that Vale Lodge, then the
hospitable home of the talented writers of ‘The Wife’s Secret’[183] and
‘Ingomar,’ was the veritable house in which the poet had resided, and
in one of the rooms of which Keats had composed the first verses of
‘Endymion.’
There is lying before me a note from a lady since closely connected with
Hampstead, in which she writes:
‘M. asks me to say that she finds Leigh Hunt and Douglas
Jerrold both lived in Mr. Lovell’s present house in the Vale of
Health.’
In a series of sketchy, ill-considered papers—the very memory of which
makes my ears tingle—I helped to give currency to this belief, but
subsequently, on reading the letters of Leigh Hunt, and the literary
recollections of his friend, Charles Cowden Clarke, I found, both from
description and allusion, that Vale Lodge could not possibly be the
‘little packing-case, by courtesy called a house,’ which Leigh Hunt
himself describes as his home at Hampstead, where he had gone for the
sake of his ‘health, and his old walks in the fields.’
It seemed a case for the ‘oldest inhabitant,’ and I was fortunately
referred to Mr. Paxon, of High Street, rate collector, etc., as his
father had been before him. An old and ailing man, but intelligent,
courteous, and communicative, he at once gave me the information I sought
for, and was at pains to point out the white, weather-boarded cottage
where, when a lad, as his father’s clerk, he had often delivered the
rate-papers to Mr. or Mrs. Hunt, whom he well remembered, and their
children also.
Even then the cottages—a row of four, if I remember aright—their prospect
bounded by the margin of what is now the Spaniards Road, with a space
of unspoiled sward before them, coming down to the garden rails, had an
air of mild gentility, the effect, probably, of their retired situation,
and the cared-for little garden plots before them, not much bigger than
an old sea-captain’s bandanna handkerchief, and quite as flowery. Some
resident had named the one Leigh Hunt had tenanted Rose Cottage. It had
then a little green trellised veranda smothered in roses and scented
clematis above the French window that opened on the garden.
My informant told me that Lord Byron had at one time lodged in another of
these cottages, and had written with a diamond on a pane of one of the
windows two lines which afterwards appeared in ‘Childe Harold.’ The pane
existed in his time, but had either been broken, or cut out and removed.
This was before Leigh Hunt’s residence there.
When, in 1895, after a prolonged absence from Hampstead, I again visited
it for the purpose of reviving my impressions of certain localities,
I naturally desired to revisit Leigh Hunt’s cottage; but time and the
alterations in the neighbourhood had confused my recollection of the way
to it, and upon inquiring, I am obliged to confess there is some truth
in the accusations of certain American magazine writers, that the people
generally are not well up in the traditions of their neighbourhood,
nor greatly interested in the homes of the poets, painters, and other
celebrities, the memory of whose fame has enriched it.
My quest was met by a frank ignorance: neither the cottage nor its
memorable occupant had been heard of by the ordinary dwellers in the
neighbourhood.
Wandering on, I was fortunate enough to recognise the high-hedged
orchard-garden that had belonged to Vale Lodge, and I had no farther
difficulty in finding my way to the whereabouts of Leigh Hunt’s cottage.
Now, instead of the open space before it and its fellows, the approach is
strangely narrowed and closed in, but on the top of the garden-gate of
the _last of the row_ of what were four white weather-boarded cottages
in my time (of which only two remain, the place of the others being
filled by two tall, narrow brick houses), the Town Council, or Board
of Works, or some other local authority, had had inserted a brass
plate, some two inches wide and five or six in length, inscribed ‘Hunt’s
Cottage.’ After this, let no American or other traveller say that we do
not commensurately keep alive the memory of our men of genius! For one
mistaken moment I felt grateful; the next I had realized that this was
not the cottage I had been assured on such excellent authority was the
one lived in by Leigh Hunt, though next door to it. But what does it
signify? Fame is far-reaching, and the space covered by the row so small
that the memory of the one little home includes the whole, and clothes
these few cottages on the south-west side of the Vale of Health with
undying interest.
Then I remembered how Leigh Hunt had written: ‘Strada Smollett is
delightful. By-and-by there will be such streets all over the world.
People will know not only the name of a street, but the reason for it.’
Soon I found myself wondering if such an important body as the Town
Council or the Board of Works could really be answerable for the sparse
bit of brass, and the obscure ‘Hunt’s Cottage’ graven on it, which might
mean any man’s cottage of the name of Hunt. There are quite a number in
the London Directory, whereas there is only one _Leigh Hunt_, the author
of ‘Rimini’ and ‘The Old Court Suburb,’ etc. Why, if intended to honour
the poet, had they deprived him of the Christian name that distinguished
him, and has a place in every reader’s memory?
I will not despair of seeing this rectified and expanded, so that all
who pass by may see the ‘writing on the wall,’ and know that for some
few years of his long life the ‘Pink of Poets,’ as his adverse critics
sarcastically called him, resided in one of these cottages, where he
wrote the greater part of, and finished, the story of ‘Rimini.’
In 1812, Leigh Hunt, writing from 37, Portland Street, Oxford Road, to
Mr. Henry Brougham, tells him that he ‘longs to get into his Hampstead
retreat, out of the stir and smoke of London.’ And a little later he
informs the same correspondent that he is about to move to a cottage at
West End, Hampstead, ‘a really _bonâ-fide_ cottage, with humble ceilings
and unsophisticated staircase; but there is green about it, and a garden
with laurels.’
I mention this because I think it is to this circumstance he alludes when
he writes in his Autobiography that ‘early in the spring of 1816 he went
to reside _again_ in Hampstead.’ His friend Charles Cowden Clarke tells
us that soon after his release from Horsemonger Lane Gaol[184] Leigh Hunt
‘occupied a pretty little cottage in the Vale of Health.’ And Leigh Hunt
himself, in a letter to a friend in 1821, observes, ‘I came to get well
in our little packing-case here, dignified with the name of house.’
Again, in later years, in answer to a letter from his friend Mr. Dalby,
he says: ‘I defy you to have _lived in a smaller cottage than I have
done_. Yet it has held Shelley and Keats and half a dozen friends in it
at once; and they have made worlds of their own within the rooms. Keats’
“Sleep and Poetry” is a description of a parlour that was mine, no larger
than an old mansion’s closet.’
Cowden Clarke tells us that when Keats slept there a bed was improvised
for him on a couch in Leigh Hunt’s library, a room at the back, rather
larger, if I remember, than the parlour.[185] Keats himself writes of it
in the poem Leigh Hunt alludes to:
‘For I am brimful of the friendliness
That in a little cottage I have found!’[186]
Whilst Shelley, writing from Italy, tells how Mrs. Williams’ singing of
‘Dorme l’amour’ transports him back to the little parlour at Hampstead.
‘I can see the piano, the prints, the casts, and hear Mary’s [Mrs. Hunt]
“Ah! ah! ah!”’ Whenever Leigh Hunt or his friends refer to the Vale of
Health cottage, the smallness of the place is, as it were, insisted on,
and accentuated by the diminutive ‘little.’
[Illustration: _Shelley._]
With such evidence as this as to the size and position of the poet’s
habitation, it appears a work of superfluity to seek after the site of
a dwelling that has never existed except in the generous imagination
of those who think talent receives honour from exterior surroundings
to which it never made pretence. Leigh Hunt in his pretty little Vale
of Health cottage (which, by the way, appears to have been as largely
receptive as the kindly heart of its proprietor) was as interesting, as
regarded, and as much sought by his friends—and what a cluster of bright
names they make!—as if he had inhabited a mansion. The same refined taste
that had given grace to his prison room reigned here, and we may depend
the roses were not wanting in the little garden-plot that had given
living, as well as pictured, beauty to those gloomy walls.[187]
[Illustration: _W. Hazlitt._]
Here the magnetism of its master, whose personality was even more
fascinating than his writings,[188] drew around him a society of the
most intellectual and clever men of the day—Hazlitt and Haydon, Telford,
Ollier, Charles Cowden Clarke, Charles Lamb, Shelley, the brothers
Horace and James Smith, Keats, and many others. Leigh Hunt himself was
not only a brilliant talker, but an accomplished musician; he sang and
played delightfully, and amongst his friends and frequent guests were the
Novellos, a family to which England is much indebted for the growth and
appreciation of good music. No wonder, therefore, that Keats should sing:
‘Scarce can I scribble on, for lovely airs
Are fluttering round the room, like doves in pairs.’
Grave Mary Shelley found the recurrence of the host’s fugues, and the
masses, madrigals, and part-songs of his musical allies at times too much
for her, and she wearied of them, but not of her delightful host.
Of all his friends, Shelley, Charles Lamb, and Keats appear to have kept
him closest company. From the first he was soon parted; but genial,
‘gentle Elia,’ and the sensitive yet strong-souled Keats, were his
sympathetic friends and frequent companions.
There is no doubt, with all his originality and independence of thought
and character, Keats was greatly influenced by Leigh Hunt. Keats’ young
enthusiasm and gratitude for Hunt’s encouragement and sympathy made him
greatly overrate his mental powers. Both were saturated with the natural
beauty of their surroundings—the woods, the fields, and what Bacon would
call ‘the winsome air and amenities of the spot.’
Even Shelley owed some of his inspirations to the sweet influences of
Hampstead; and we find him loitering in the fields, or leaning, notebook
in hand, upon the old gray gate that admitted (notwithstanding the notice
to trespassers) to the green glooms of Caen Wood, or one of those other
gates, leading up to the charming walk to Highgate, with Caen Wood on one
side, and the linked ponds on the other. I pleasure myself in thinking
that it may have been in the blue, clear, ambient sky above the Heath
that he heard the skylark singing:
‘Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heedeth not!’
Sometimes he might be seen pensively sauntering in Millfield Lane,[189]
between Caen Wood and Highgate, an ideal lane in those days, secluded
between great wayside elms and other trees, ‘Of beechen green, and
shadows numberless,’ curving in its course, and farther sheltered by
high hedges, not looking as if begrudged the ground they occupied, but
buttressed by wide, grassy banks, bright with wild-flowers, fragrant
with rose and woodbine in their season, and clustered generously with
primroses in spring.
[Illustration: _Highgate Ponds and Sheep._]
Hither came Collins, and Leslie, and Constable, as Gainsborough had
done before them, for their foregrounds of soft mosses, that underline
the sward in late autumn as down does the breasts of birds; and the
big bronze dock-leaves, and vari-coloured toadstools, and the painted
cups of scarlet peziza[190] that bloom, as it were, on bits of sere
wood and dead branches. A lane so lovely that it charmed the ordinary
wayfarer, and inspired poets and artists; so that when, some years ago, a
correspondent of the _Athenæum_ drew attention to the fact that official
vandalism was destroying its natural loveliness, cutting down some of the
fine old trees, and lopping others of the umbrageous branches that had
shaded the heads of Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, ‘Elia,’ and Leigh Hunt, as
well as those of many of our best known and loved artists, a feeling of
general indignation was aroused, and much local influence exerted to stop
the farther destruction of a spot so full of interest and association,
but with what effect I am ignorant.
[Illustration: _Coleridge._]
To this picturesque old lane, and other lovely bits of Hampstead and its
neighbourhood, the triad of poets whose centre was Leigh Hunt’s cottage
are indebted for many a rustic image, many an exquisite description of
pastoral and woodland scenery. The picturesque old trees, the aerial
suggestions, the near cornfields and country lanes, the rippling or
moss-muffled rills that then channelled the grassy slopes, and trickled
down to the Fleet ditch at Kentish Town, were mentally preserved, to
reappear in verse that gives them immortality.
From a boy, Leigh Hunt, whose father at one time lived in Hampstead
Square, had been familiar with the beautiful suburb, and for some months
before the publication of ‘Rimini’ had been daily wandering about the
precincts of Caen Wood, and the grassy land
‘From which the trees as from a carpet rise,
In knolls, and clumps, with rich varieties,’
just as they did on South Hill half a century ago.
There, too, he found his ‘plashy pools with rushes,’ and it may be—for
Hampstead Heath has seen many such morns of May:
‘Last of the spring, yet fresh with all its green,
For a warm eve, and gentle rain at night,
Have left a sparkling welcome for the light.
And there’s a crystal clearness all about;
The leaves are sharp, the distant hills look out,
A balmy briskness comes upon the breeze,
The smoke goes dancing from the cottage trees;
And, when you listen, you may hear the coil
Of bubbling springs about the grassy soil.’
It may be that the inception of these felicitously-descriptive lines was
due to local influence, for, though written of Italy, they are as true
a transcript of many an early summer’s morn at Hampstead (where Crabb
Robinson tells us the pleasure of waking and looking out of window from
his friend Hammond’s house[191] was worth walking from London overnight
to enjoy) as of a waking village landscape in the neighbourhood of
Ravenna.
It is otherwise in winter, with snow on the ground, and a fierce wind
blowing, for the wind, Leigh Hunt tells us, ‘loses nothing of its
fierceness on Hampstead Heath.’ It was on such a bitter winter night
that Shelley, in either going to or leaving the little cot in the Vale
of Health, found a woman lying insensible on the snow on the top of the
hill, and, knocking at the first door he came to, asked to have her taken
in and cared for—or, at least, that she might be placed in an outhouse
out of the inclement night. Being refused, he made an application at
the second house, with the same result. Indignant at this seeming
want of charity and the uselessness of his intercession, he took her
up, and carried her down the frozen path to his friend’s cottage, the
expansiveness of which he well knew when an act of compassion was in
question. Nor was it ill bestowed. The woman, who was on her way to
Hendon, ‘had been all day attending a criminal court, at which a charge
had been made against her son, and, though he had been acquitted, the
suspense and agitation, added to fatigue, had affected her so seriously
as to produce fits; from which the doctor who was called in asserted she
could not have recovered but for the timely care and shelter bestowed
upon her.’
Cowden Clarke gives us a glimpse of Shelley on the Heath under other
conditions—‘scampering and bounding over the gorse bushes late at
night, now close upon us, and now shouting from the height like a wild
schoolboy.’ It was on his return to town, after one of his overnight
visits to the ‘Hampstead bard,’ that Shelley, accompanied by the latter,
astonished the only other inside passenger of the Hampstead coach—a
stiffly-silent old gentlewoman, who, in spite of various attempts to draw
her into conversation, determinedly maintained a severe reticence—by
suddenly exclaiming:
‘For God’s sake, Hunt,
‘Let’s talk of graves, and worms, and epitaphs,
Make dust our paper, and, with rainy eyes,
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth;
Let’s choose executors, and talk of wills’
—a choice of subjects that seemed to scare the lady, and make her look
as if she believed herself in the near neighbourhood of one Bedlamite at
least.
It was Leigh Hunt who introduced Keats to ‘the old man eloquent’—S. T.
Coleridge—whom they met when walking in the fields between Highgate and
Hampstead—the upland fields that offered such fair views in those days to
the lovers of them. They walked with him two miles, at the end of which
Keats tells us that, though the sage had broached a hundred subjects,
all he knew was that he had heard his voice as he came towards them, and
heard it as he moved away—and all the interim, if he might so express it;
but apparently the discourse had no sequence or conclusion, except that
utterance of the mild, then somewhat fatuous-looking old man; that it was
just as well he did not comprehend, who, after shaking hands with Keats,
turned to Leigh Hunt, who lingered in bidding the author of ‘Christabel’
and ‘The Ancient Mariner’ farewell, and whispered to him that he felt
death in the touch of the young poet’s hand.
Mrs. Cowden Clarke tells us that Charles C. Clarke introduced Keats, his
old friend and schoolmate, to Leigh Hunt in his Vale of Health cottage.
But this is a mistake; Hunt himself, in his Autobiography, distinctly
says: ‘_It was not at Hampstead that I first saw Keats_; it was in York
Buildings, in the New Road’ (now Euston Road), ‘No. 8, where I wrote part
of the “Indicator,” and he resided with me in Mortimer Terrace, Kentish
Town, No. 13, where I concluded it.’
Leigh Hunt’s tenancy of his little Vale of Health cottage was but a short
one; he went there, as we have seen, in 1816, and early in 1819 we find
him writing to C. C. Clarke:
‘As we must certainly move, we have made up our minds to move to Kentish
Town, which is a sort of compromise between London and our beloved
Hampstead. The London end touches so nearly Camden Town, which is so
near London, that Marianne will not be afraid of my returning from the
theatres at night, and the country is extremely quiet and rural, running
to the woods, and the shops between Hampstead and Highgate.’
Accordingly, on February 15, 1819, he writes from Mortimer Terrace:
‘Hampstead is now in my eye—hill, trees, church, and all the slope of
Caen Wood, to my right, and Primrose and Haverstock Hills, with Steele’s
cottage, to my left.’
[Illustration: _Charles Lamb._]
One looks regretfully back to the breaking up of the little literary
home in the Vale of Health—the roof under which Hunt tells us that he
had introduced Shelley to the young poet Keats; that had welcomed the
handsome, brown-faced Charles Lamb, and his always-to-be-pitied sister
Mary; where the genial C. Cowden Clarke came and went as he listed,
bursting in like a mingling of breeze and sunshine, full of freshness and
warmth; and Keats, keenly sensitive and self-contained, who, loving his
old schoolmaster’s son, to whom he owed deep obligations—the ‘first to
teach him all the sweets of song’—yet thought the laughter-loving Clarke,
in spite of his poetical taste, ‘coarse.’ One would fain have kept them a
little longer dwellers in ‘sweet Hampstead.’
First Shelley sails away for Dante’s land, whither Hunt and Keats were
eventually to follow him—the first to join Lord Byron in a literary
enterprise that did not answer its noble projector’s expectations,’[192]
and Keats in the companionship and care of his devoted friend, the
young and promising artist Severn, with the vain hope of lengthening
the thinning thread of life that bound him to earth. Throughout these
years of failing health and mental trial Keats was suffering the sordid
cares of insufficient means—cares that to an independent, upright spirit
such as his, must have been an ever-present source of uneasiness and
depression. The critics’ half-hearted verdict on ‘Endymion,’ when, as in
the case of some of his reviewers, it was not cruel, must have deeply
wounded the sensitive nature of the poet, who had yet the manliness to
hide his wounds, and the faith in himself to fall back on the consolation
of his own conviction of the vitality of his work. It stirs one with a
feeling of indignation, remembering the depreciation of the poem in the
poet’s lifetime, to read that at a sale of autographs in the September of
the year 1897 the original manuscript of John Keats’ ‘Endymion’ sold for
£695.
It has been told me by one who knew Leigh Hunt long subsequent to his
return from Italy, that no one who came within the charm of his kindly
nature and delightful fancy could refrain from loving him. He was full
of friendliness and human sympathy, and ready to render kindness to all
who needed it, virtues that made men overlook other short-comings in his
character—his vanity and want of a proper feeling of self-dependence: he
was too apt to throw himself and his difficulties upon his friends. Mrs.
Barbauld could see no beauty in his ‘Rimini’; it is, according to her
ideas, ‘most fantastic’; she was without the power of feeling the natural
simplicity and picturesqueness of Hunt; to her he was an author, who,
‘in exaggeration of all the slovenliness of the new school, has thought
proper to come into public with his neckcloth untied and his stockings
about his heels.’ She could not comprehend his originality, or the
half-antiquated but expressive phraseology that gave such piquancy to his
prose writings, and has made his Essays, as a recent writer has observed,
worthy to have a place on the same shelf with those of ‘Elia.’
Long after Leigh Hunt had vacated the little cottage in the Vale of
Health another charming reminiscence attaches to the locality.
[Illustration: _Leigh Hunt._]
Lord Dufferin, in his delightful memoir of his lovely and talented
mother, Helen, Lady Dufferin (then Mrs. Blackwood), the writer of many
sweet lyrics, tells us that she tenanted one of those _toy_ cottages in
the Vale of Health,[193] Hampstead, where she sought health, and found
it—so much so that the next summer she took a larger cottage in the same
neighbourhood, probably Pavilion Cottage, a rather odd association,
which Mr. Baines mentions as having been her ladyship’s abode at one
time. He does not name her having lived in one of the smaller cottages
previously.
Some time between 1855-60 the Lovells removed from their house in
Mornington Crescent, where they had been the near neighbours of George
Cruikshank, the Westland Marstons, Mrs. Oliphant, and many other literary
and artistic friends, to Vale Lodge, in the Vale of Health, which, as I
have elsewhere said, they fully believed to have been the Hampstead home
of Leigh Hunt—a representation that, perhaps, the agent, or some other
interested person, found useful in letting the house. Though of very
modest proportions, it by no means tallied with Leigh Hunt’s description
of his ‘little packing-case,’ nor did the parlours (there were more than
one) resemble an old mansion’s closets, which the single one in the toy
cottage did very closely. Mr. Lovell’s residence here was not a very long
one, and the family subsequently removed to Lyndhurst Road.
Since I first knew this part of Hampstead it has grown into quite a large
and noisy suburb of the town, and the secluded and rustic character of
the Vale has wholly changed. Rows and terraces of fifth-rate houses cover
the grassy slopes and gravelly mounds, then crested with furze-bushes and
occasional beds of heath, and the turf that, in spite of the thousands
of feet that at Easter and Whitsuntide trod it nearly bare, continued to
renew itself.
There was not much left for the botanist on the East Heath, but plenty of
space and freshness, and the wild simplicity of natural heathland, for
the twice yearly throngs of visitors from the dull courts and stifling
alleys of London.
Now two large hideous buildings, utterly out of character with the
locality, dominate the houses—the one a German club-house, the other
used for refreshment-rooms, which have partly put an end to the simple,
out-of-doors accommodation of the cottage folk.
[Illustration: _The Vale of Health._]
This part of the Vale is further vulgarized by what appears to be a
stationary steam merry-go-round, swings, etc., additions to the ‘’Appy
’Ampstead’ of ’Arry and ’Arriet, but an eyesore to those who imagine the
freshness of leafy trees and greensward would be more real enjoyment
to town-worn folk than the conventionalities of a country fair, or a
gas-lighted corner off the High Street, Battersea.
Yet, as long as Hampstead survives, and that infelt law of attraction
in human hearts to visit the homes of men and women whose thoughts have
touched the spirits and enriched the minds of tens of thousands of their
fellow-creatures, so long will Hampstead have its pilgrims, and Leigh
Hunt’s lowly cottage be sought for.
I can hardly get away from it, with its memories, not only of the
poet-essayist, but of his affinities. The best writers, and other men
‘of mark and likelihood,’ in the first decades of our swiftly-waning
century, were its guests, and shared those frugal _symposia_ that Cowden
Clarke has told us of, severely simple, at which not the viands, but the
company, made the feast. And then, on summer evenings, the strolling on
to the Heath, of which the cottage was but the vestibule, with Clarke
and Shelley, or Lamb and Keats, watching the glorious sunsets from the
western heights, and lingering on till twilight deepened and the stars
came out. Or waiting at high-tides, till the white moonlight of the
summer night enwrapped the woods, and Heath, and shining ponds, and made
the whole scene one of ethereal beauty, the charms of which, and of
their own converse, belated them, until the early thrush and blackbird
serenaded the dawn, and the friends said ‘Good-night’ and ‘Good-morning’
in the same breath.