A BREATH OF ENGLISH AIR.
My friend looked white as the wall, flung the "London Times" half across
the room, kicked one slipper into the air and shouted, "Talmage, where on
earth did you come from?" as one summer I stepped into his English home.
"Just come over the ferry to dine with you," I responded. After some
explanation about the health of my family, which demanded a sea voyage, and
thus necessitated my coming, we planned two or three excursions.
At eight o'clock in the morning we gathered in the parlor in the Red Horse
Hotel, at Stratford-on-Avon. Two pictures of Washington Irving, the chair
in which the father of American literature sat, and the table on which he
wrote, immortalizing his visit to that hotel, adorn the room. From thence
we sallied forth to see the clean, quaint village of Stratford. It was
built just to have Shakspeare born in. We have not heard that there was any
one else ever born there, before or since. If, by any strange possibility,
it could be proved that the great dramatist was born anywhere else, it
would ruin all the cab drivers, guides and hostelries of the place.
We went of course to the house where Shakspeare first appeared on the stage
of life, and enacted the first act of his first play. Scene the first.
Enter John Shakspeare, the father; Mrs. Shakspeare, the mother, and the old
nurse, with young William.
A very plain house it is. Like the lark, which soars highest, but builds
its nest lowest, so with genius; it has humble beginnings. I think ten
thousand dollars would be a large appraisement for all the houses where the
great poets were born. But all the world comes to this lowly dwelling.
Walter Scott was glad to scratch his name on the window, and you may see it
now. Charles Dickens, Edmund Kean, Albert Smith, Mark Lemon and Tennyson,
so very sparing of their autographs, have left their signatures on the
wall. There are the jambs of the old fire-place where the poet warmed
himself and combed wool, and began to think for all time. Here is the chair
in which he sat while presiding at the club, forming habits of drink which
killed him at the last, his own life ending in a tragedy as terrible as any
he ever wrote. Exeunt wine-bibbers, topers, grogshop keepers, Drayton, Ben
Jonson and William Shakspeare. Here also is the letter which Richard Quyney
sent to Shakspeare, asking to borrow thirty pounds. I hope he did not loan
it; for if he did, it was a dead loss.
We went to the church where the poet is buried. It dates back seven hundred
years, but has been often restored. It has many pictures, and is the
sleeping place of many distinguished dead; but one tomb within the chancel
absorbs all the attention of the stranger. For hundreds of years the world
has looked upon the unadorned stone lying flat over the dust of William
Shakspeare, and read the epitaph written by himself:
"Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare
To dig the dust enclosed here;
Bleste be ye man yt spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones."
Under such anathema the body has slept securely. A sexton once looked in at
the bones, but did not dare to touch them, lest his "quietus" should be
made with a bare bodkin.
From the church door we mounted our carriage; and crossing the Avon on a
bridge which the lord mayor of London built four hundred years ago, we
start on one of the most memorable rides of our life. The country looked
fresh and luxuriant from recent rains. The close-trimmed hedges, the sleek
cattle, the snug cottages, the straggling villages with their historic
inns, the castle from whose park Shakspeare stole the deer, the gate called
"Shakspeare's stile," curious in the fact that it looks like ordinary bars
of fence, but as you attempt to climb over, the whole thing gives way, and
lets you fall flat, righting itself as soon as it is unburdened of you; the
rabbits darting along the hedges, undisturbed, because it is unlawful, save
for licensed hunters, to shoot, and then not on private property; the
perfect weather, the blue sky, the exhilarating breeze, the glorious elms
and oaks by the way,--make it a day that will live when most other days are
dead.
At two o'clock we came in sight of Kenilworth Castle. Oh, this is the place
to stir the blood. It is the king of ruins. Warwick is nothing; Melrose is
nothing, compared with it. A thousand great facts look out through the
broken windows. Earls and kings and queens sit along the shattered sides of
the banqueting halls. The stairs are worn deep with the feet that have
clambered them for eight hundred years. As a loving daughter arranges the
dress of an old man, so every season throws a thick mantle of ivy over the
mouldering wall. The roof that caught and echoed back the merriment of dead
ages has perished. Time has struck his chisel into every inch of the
structure. By the payment of only three-pence you find access to places
where only the titled were once permitted to walk. You go in, and are
overwhelmed with the thoughts of past glory and present decay. These halls
were promenaded by Richard Coeur de Lion; in this chapel burned the tomb
lights over the grave of Geoffrey de Clinton; in these dungeons kings
groaned; in these doorways duchesses fainted. Scene of gold, and silver,
and scroll work, and chiseled arch, and mosaic. Here were heard the
carousals of the Round Table; from those very stables the caparisoned
horses came prancing out for the tournament; through that gateway strong,
weak, heroic, mean, splendid, Queen Elizabeth advanced to the castle, while
the waters of the lake gleamed under torchlights, and the battlements were
aflame with rockets; and cornet, and hautboy, and trumpet poured their
music on the air; and goddesses glided out from the groves to meet her; and
from turret to foundation Kenilworth trembled under a cannonade, and for
seventeen days, at a cost of five thousand dollars a day, the festival was
kept. Four hundred servants standing in costly livery; sham battles between
knights on horseback; jugglers tumbling on the grass; thirteen bears baited
for the amusement of the guests; three hundred and twenty hogsheads of beer
consumed, till all Europe applauded, denounced and stood amazed.
Where is the glory now? What has become of the velvet? Who wears the
jewels? Would Amy Robsart have so longed to get into the castle had she
known its coming ruin? Where are those who were waited on, and those who
waited? What has become of Elizabeth, the visitor, and Robert Dudley, the
visited? Cromwell's men dashed upon the scene; they drained the lakes; they
befouled the banquet hall; they dismantled the towers; they turned the
castle into a tomb, on whose scarred and riven sides ambition and cruelty
and lust may well read their doom. "So let all thine enemies perish, O
Lord; but let them that love him be as the sun when he goeth forth in his
might."