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A LITERARY PILGRIMAGE
SEVENTH EDITION
* * * * * *
_BY DR. WOLFE_
Uniform with this volume
LITERARY SHRINES
THE HAUNTS OF SOME FAMOUS AMERICAN AUTHORS
_Treating descriptively and reminiscently of the scenes amid which
Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, Emerson, and many other American
authors lived and wrote_
223 pages. Illustrated with four photogravures. $1.25
A LITERARY PILGRIMAGE AND LITERARY SHRINES
Two volumes in a box, $2.50
* * * * * *
[Illustration: CASTLE OF CHILLON]
A LITERARY PILGRIMAGE AMONG THE HAUNTS
OF FAMOUS BRITISH AUTHORS
by
THEODORE F. WOLFE
M.D. PH.D.
Author of Literary Shrines etc.
J. B. Lippincott Company
Philadelphia MDCCCXCVI
Copyright, 1895,
By
Theodore F. Wolfe.
Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, U.S.A.
PREFACE
The favor with which a few articles in the periodical press, similar to
those herewith presented, have been received induces the hope that the
present volume may prove acceptable. If some popular literary shrines
which are inevitably included in the writer's personal itinerary are
herein accorded but scant notice, it is for the reason that they have
been already so oft described that portrayal of them is therefore
purposely omitted from this account of a literary pilgrimage: even
Stratford-on-Avon here for once escapes description. However, the
initial paragraphs of these chapters lightly outline a series of
literary rambles which the writer has found measurably complete and
consecutive. The pilgrim is understood to make his start from London.
If these notes of his sojourns in the scenes hallowed by the presence of
British authors or embalmed in their books shall prove pleasantly
reminiscent to some who have fared to the same shrines, or helpfully
suggestive to others who contemplate such pilgrimage, then
"not in vain
He wore his sandal shoon and scallop-shell."
The writer is indebted to the publishers of the _Home Journal_ for
permission to reproduce one or two articles which have appeared in that
periodical.
T. F. W.
CONTENTS
PAGE
LITERARY HAMPSTEAD AND HIGHGATE.
_Haunt of Dickens--Steele--Pope--Keats--Baillie--Johnson--Hunt--
Akenside--Shelley--Hogarth--Addison--Richardson--Gay--Besant--Du
Maurier--Coleridge, etc.--Grave of George Eliot_ 13
BY SOUTHWARK AND THAMES-SIDE TO CHELSEA.
_Chaucer--Shakespeare--Dickens--Walpole--Pepys--Eliot--Rossetti--
Carlyle--Hunt--Gay--Smollett--Kingsley--Herbert--Dorset--
Addison--Shaftesbury--Locke--Bolingbroke--Pope--Richardson, etc._ 24
THE SCENE OF GRAY'S ELEGY.
_The Country Church-Yard--Tomb of Gray--Stoke-Pogis Church--
Reverie and Reminiscence--Scenes of Milton--Waller--Porter--
Coke--Denham_ 39
DICKENSLAND: GAD'S HILL AND ABOUT.
_Chaucer's Pilgrims--Falstaff--Dickens's Abode--Study--Grounds--
Walks--Neighbors--Guests--Scenes of Tales--Cobham--Rochester--
Pip's Church-Yard--Satis House, etc._ 49
SOME HAUNTS OF BYRON.
_Birthplace--London Homes--Murray's Book-Store--Kensal Green--
Harrow--Byron's Tomb--His Diadem Hill--Abode of his Star of
Annesley--Portraits--Mementos_ 62
THE HOME OF CHILDE HAROLD.
_Newstead--Byron's Apartments--Relics and Reminders--Ghosts--
Ruins--The Young Oak--Dog's Tomb--Devil's Wood--Irving--
Livingstone--Stanley--Joaquin Miller_ 80
WARWICKSHIRE: THE LOAMSHIRE OF GEORGE ELIOT.
_Miss Mulock--Butler--Somervile--Dyer--Rugby--Homes of George
Eliot--Scenes of Tales--Cheverel--Shepperton--Milly's Grave--
Paddiford--Milby--Coventry, etc.--Characters--Incidents_ 91
YORKSHIRE SHRINES: DOTHEBOYS HALL AND ROKEBY.
_Village of Bowes--Dickens--Squeers's School--The Master and his
Family--Haunt of Scott_ 106
STERNE'S SWEET RETIREMENT.
_Sutton--Crazy Castle--Yorick's Church--Parsonage--Where Tristram
Shandy and the Sentimental Journey were written--Reminiscences--
Newburgh Hall--Where Sterne died--Sepulchre_ 111
HAWORTH AND THE BRONTES.
_The Village--Black Bull Inn--Church--Vicarage--Memory-haunted
Rooms--Bronte Tomb--Moors--Bronte Cascade--Wuthering Heights--
Humble Friends--Relic and Recollection_ 121
EARLY HAUNTS OF ROBERT COLLYER: EUGENE ARAM.
_Childhood Home--Ilkley Scenes, Friends, Smithy, Chapel--Bolton--
Associations--Wordsworth--Rogers--Eliot--Turner--Aram's Homes--
Schools--Place of the Murder--Gibbet--Probable Innocence_ 136
HOME OF SYDNEY SMITH.
_Heslington--Foston, Twelve Miles from a Lemon--Church-Rector's
Head--Study--Room-of-all-work--Grounds--Guests--Universal
Scratcher--Immortal Chariot--Reminiscences_ 148
NITHSDALE RAMBLES.
_Scott--Hogg--Wordsworth--Carlye's Birthplace--Homes--Grave--
Burns's Haunts--Tomb--Jeanie Deans--Old Mortality, etc.--Annie
Laurie's Birthplace--Habitation--Poet-Lover--Descendants_ 161
A NIECE OF ROBERT BURNS.
_Her Burnsland Cottage--Reminiscences of Burns--Relics--
Portraits--Letters--Recitations--Account of his Death--Memories
of his Home--Of Bonnie Jean--Other Heroines_ 181
HIGHLAND MARY: HER HOMES AND GRAVE.
_Birthplace--Personal Appearance--Relations to Burns--Abodes:
Mauchline, Coilsfield, etc.--Scenes of Courtship and Parting--
Mementos--Tomb by the Clyde_ 194
BRONTE SCENES IN BRUSSELS.
_School--Class-Rooms--Dormitory--Garden--Scenes and Events of
Villette and The Professor--M. Paul--Madame Beck--Memories of
the Brontes--Confessional--Grave of Jessy Yorke_ 207
LEMAN'S SHRINES.
_Beloved of Litterateurs--Gibbon--D'Aubigne--Rousseau--Byron--
Shelley--Dickens, etc.--Scenes of Childe Harold--Nouvelle
Heloise--Prisoner of Chillon--Land of Byron_ 226
CHATEAUX OF FERNEY AND COPPET.
_Voltaire's Home, Church, Study, Garden, Relics--Literary Court of
de Stael--Mementos--Famous Rooms, Guests--Schlegel--Shelley--
Constant--Byron--Davy, etc.--De Stael's Tomb_ 238
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Castle of Chillon _Frontispiece._
Stoke-Pogis Church and Church-Yard 45
Newstead Abbey 81
Home of Annie Laurie 177
LITERARY HAMPSTEAD AND HIGHGATE
_Haunt of Dickens--Steele--Pope--Keats--Baillie--Johnson--Hunt--
Akenside--Shelley--Hogarth--Addison--Richardson--Gay--Besant--Du
Maurier--Coleridge, etc.--Grave of George Eliot._
The explorations which first brought renown to the immortal Pickwick
were made among the uplands which border the valley of the Thames at the
north of London: the illustrious creator of Pickwick loved to wander in
the same region through the picturesque landscapes he made the scenes of
many incidents of his fiction, and the literary prowler of to-day can
hardly find a ramble more to his mind than that from the former home of
Dickens or George Eliot by Regent's Park to Hampstead, and thence
through the famous heath to Highgate. The way traverses storied ground
and teems with historic associations, but these are, for us, lessened
and subordinated by the appeal of memories of the famous authors who
have loved and haunted this delightful region, and have imparted to it
the tenderest charm. The acclivity of Hampstead has measurably resisted
the encroachment of London, and has deflected the railroads with their
disturbing tendencies, so that this old town probably retains more of
its ancient character than any other of the near suburbs, and some of
its quaint streets would scarcely be more quiet if they lay a hundred
miles away from the metropolis. Off the highway by which we ascend the
hill, we find many evidences of antiquity, old streets lined by rows of
plain and sedate dwellings wearing an air of dignified sobriety which is
not of this century, and which is in grateful contrast with the pert
artificiality of the modern fabrics of the vicinage. Many old houses are
draped with ivy or shrouded by trees of abundant foliage; some are shut
in by depressing brick walls, over which float the perfumes of unseen
flowers. A few of the older streets lie in perpetual crepuscule, being
vaulted by gigantic elms and limes as opaque as arches of masonry.
[Sidenote: Baillie--Johnson--Kit-Kat Club]
[Sidenote: Keats]
Along the slope of Haverstock hill, where our ascent begins, we find the
sometime homes of Percival, Stanfield, Rowland Hill, and the historian
Palgrave. Near by is the cottage where dwelt Mrs. Barbauld, and the
Roslyn House, where Sheridan, Pitt, Burke, and Fox were guests of
Loughborough. Here, too, formerly stood the mansion where Steele
entertained the poet of the "Dunciad," with Garth and other famed wits.
On the hill-side a leafy lane leads out of High Street to the
picturesque church of the parish, whose tower is a conspicuous
landmark. Within this fane we find, against the wall on the right of the
chancel, the beautiful marble bust recently erected by American admirers
"To the Ever-living Memory" of the author of "Lamia" and "Hyperion."
Here, too, is the plain memorial tablet of the poetess Joanna Baillie,
who lived in an unpretentious mansion lately standing in the
neighborhood, where she was visited by Wordsworth, Rogers, and others of
potential genius. In the thickly tenanted church-yard she sleeps with
her sister near the graves of Incledon, Erskine, and the historian
Mackintosh. Below the church, on the westering slope, lies embowered
Frognall, once the home of Gay, where Dr. Johnson lived and wrote "The
Vanity of Human Wishes" in the house where the gifted Nichol now resides
with the author of "Ships that Pass in the Night" for a neighbor and
with the home of Besant in view from his study. Near the summit of
Hampstead stands a sober old edifice which was of yore the Upper Flask
tavern, where the famous Kit-Kat Club held its summer _seances_, when
such luminous spirits as Walpole, Prior, Dorset, Pope, Congreve, Swift,
Steele, and Addison assembled here in the low-panelled rooms which we
may still see, or beneath the old trees of the garden, and interchanged
sallies of wit and fancy over their cakes and ale. To this inn Lovelace
brought the "Clarissa Harlowe" of Richardson's famed romance, and here
Steevens, the scholiast of Shakespeare, lived and died. Flask Walk,
which leads out of the high street among old houses and greeneries,
brings us to the shadowy Well Walk, with its overarching trees and with
many living memories masoned into its dead walls. Here we see the little
remnant of the once famous well which for a time made Hampstead a resort
for the fashionable and the suffering. Among the fancied invalids who
once dwelt in Well Walk was the spouse of Dr. Johnson. Akenside,
Arbuthnot, and Mrs. Barbauld (editor of "Richardson's Correspondence")
have sometime lived in this same little street; here the mother of
Tennyson died, and here the sweet boy-poet Keats lodged and wrote
"Endymion." At a house still to be seen in the vicinage he was for two
years the guest of his friend Brown; here he wrote "Hyperion," "St.
Agnes," and the "Ode to a Nightingale," and here he wasted in mortal
illness, being at last removed to Rome only to die. Under the limes of
Well Walk is a spot especially hallowed by the memory of Keats: it was
the object and limit of his walks in his later months, and here was
placed a seat (which until lately was preserved and bore his name),
where he sat for hours at a time beneath the whispering boughs, gazing,
often through tears, upon the enchanting vista of wave-like woods and
fields, the valley with its gleaming lakelets, and the farther slopes
crowned by the spires of Highgate, which rise out of banks of foliage.
The view is no less beautiful than when Keats's vision lingered lovingly
upon it, although we must go into the open fields to behold it now.
[Sidenote: The Heath]
[Sidenote: Leigh Hunt--Jack Straw's Castle]
If we bestir ourselves to reach the summit of the heath before the
accustomed pall shall have settled down upon the great city, the
exertion will be abundantly rewarded by the prospect that greets us as
we overlook the abodes of eight millions of souls. Such a view is
possible nowhere else on earth: outspread before us lies the vast
metropolis with its seven thousand miles of streets, while without and
beyond this aggregation of houses we behold an expanse of landscape
diversified with vale and hill, copse and field, village and park,
extending for leagues in every direction and embracing portions of seven
of England's populous shires. We see the great dome of St. Paul's and
the tall towers of Westminster rising out of the mass of myriad roofs;
the Crystal Palace glinting amid its green terraces; across the city we
behold the verdured slopes of Surrey and, farther away, the higher hills
of Sussex; our eyes follow the course of the Thames from imperial
Windsor, whose battlements are misty in the distance of the western
horizon, to its mouth at Gravesend; yonder at the right is Harrow, set
on its classic hill-top, with its ancient church by which the boy Byron
idled and dreamed; northward we see pretty Barnet, where "Oliver Twist"
met the "Dodger;" nearer is romantic Highgate, and all around us lie the
green slopes and leafy recesses of the heath. Through these strode the
murderer Sykes of Dickens's tale, and from the higher parts of this
common we may trace the way of his aimless flight from the pursuing eyes
of Nancy,--through Islington and Highgate to Hendon and Hatfield, and
thence to the place of his miserable death at Rotherhithe. There are
hours of delightful strolling amid the mazes of the picturesque heath,
with its alternations of heathered hills and flower-decked dales, its
pretty pools, its braes of brambled gorse and pine, its tangle of
countless paths. One will not wonder that it has been the resort of
_litterateurs_ from the time of Dryden till now: Pope, Goldsmith, and
Johnson loved to ramble here; Hunt, Dickens, Collins, and Thackeray were
familiar with these shady paths; Nichol, Besant, James, and Du Maurier
are now to be seen among the walkers on the heath. A worn path bearing
to the right conducts to the turf-carpeted vale where, in a little
cottage whose site is now occupied by the inn, Leigh Hunt lived for
some years. Such guests as Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Hood, and Cornwall
came to this humble home, and here Shelley met Keats, the "Adonais" of
his elegy. Not far away lie the ponds of Pickwick's unwearied
researches; and in another corner of the common we find an ancient
tavern bowered with shrubbery, in whose garden Addison and Steele oft
sipped their ale of a summer evening, and where is still cherished a
portion of a tree planted by Hogarth. On an elevation of the heath
stands "Jack Straw's Castle," believed to mark the place of encampment
of that rebel chieftain with his mob of peasantry. It is a curious old
structure, with wainscoted walls, and was especially favored by Dickens,
who often dined here with Maclise and Forster and read to them his MSS.
or counselled with them concerning his plots. Out on the heath near by
was found the corpse of Sadlier the speculator, who, after bankrupting
thousands of confiding dupes, committed suicide here; his career
suggested to Dickens the Merdle and his complaint of "Little Dorrit."
Among the embowered dwellings beyond West Heath we find that in which
Chatham was self-immured, the cottage in which Mrs. Coventry
Patmore--the Angel in the House--died, the place where Crabbe sojourned
with Hoare. This vicinage has been the delight of artists from the time
of Gainsborough, and is still a favorite sketching ground: here lived
Collins and Blake, and Constable dwelt not far away. The author of
"Trilby," who has recently taken front rank in the literary profession,
long had home and studio in a picturesque ivy-grown brick mansion of
many angles and turrets, in a quiet street upon the other side of the
hill; here among his treasures of art he commenced a third book soon to
be published.
[Sidenote: The Spaniard's]
The highway which leads north from Jack Straw's affords an exhilarating
walk, with a superb prospect upon either hand, and brings us to the
historic Spaniard's Inn, a pleasant wayside resort decked with vines and
flowers, where pedestrians stop for refreshments. Dickens oft came to
this place, and here we see the shady garden, with its tables and seats,
where Mrs. Bardell held with her cronies the mild revel which was
interrupted by the arrest of the widow for the costs in Bardell _vs._
Pickwick. The quiet of this ancient inn was disturbed one night by a
fierce band of Gordon rioters, who rushed up the paths of the heath on
their way to Mansfield's house, and stopped here to drink or destroy the
contents of the inn-cellars,--an occurrence which is graphically
described by Dickens in the looting of the Maypole Inn of Willet, in
"Barnaby Rudge." Next to the Spaniard's once lived Erskine, and among
the grand beeches of Caen Wood we see the house of Mansfield, where the
daughter of Mary Montagu was mistress, and where illustrious guests like
Pope, Southey, and Coleridge were entertained.
[Sidenote: Home of Coleridge]
A farther walk through the noble wood brings us to the delightful suburb
of Highgate, where we now vainly seek the Arundel House where the great
Bacon died and find only the site of the simple cottage where Marvell,
the "British Aristides," lived and wrote. The last home of the author of
"Ancient Mariner" is in a row of pleasant houses on a shady street
called The Grove, a little way from the high street, which was in
Coleridge's time the great Northern coach-road from London. The house is
a neat brick structure of two stories, in which we may see the room
where the poet lodged and where he breathed out his melancholy life. A
pretty little patch of turf is in front of the dwelling, a larger
garden, beloved by the poet, is at the back, and the trees which border
the foot-walk were planted in his lifetime. To this cosy refuge he came
to reside with his friends the Gilmans; here he was visited by Hunt, who
once lodged in the next street, Lamb, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Shelley, De
Quincey, and others of like fame; and here, for nineteen years,
"afflicted with manifold infirmities," he continued the struggle against
a baneful habit, which ended only with his life. His grave was made not
far away, in a portion of the church-yard which has since been overbuilt
by a school, among whose crypt-like under-arches we find the tomb of
stone, lying in pathetic and perpetual twilight, where the poet sleeps
well without the lethean drug which ruined his life. On this hill lived
"Copperfield" with Dora, and at its foot is the stone where Whittington
sat and heard the bells recall him to London.
[Sidenote: Grave of George Eliot]
On the slope toward the city is the most beautiful of the London
cemeteries, with a wealth of verdure and bloom. Within its hallowed
shades lie the ashes of many whose memories are more fragrant than the
flowers that deck their graves. In a beautiful spot which was beloved by
the sweet singer in life we find the tomb of Parepa Rosa, tended by
loving hands; not far away, among the mourning cypresses, lie Lyndhurst
and the great Faraday. A plain tombstone erected by Dickens marks the
sepulchre of his parents, and by it lies his daughter Dora, her
gravestone bearing now, besides her simple epitaph prepared by her
father, the name of the novelist himself and the names of two of his
sons. Here, too, is the grave of Rossetti's young wife, whence his
famous poems were exhumed. Among the many tombs of the enclosure, the
one to which most pilgrims come is that of the immortal author of
"Romola." On a verdant slope we find the spot where, upon a cold and
stormy day which tested the affection of her friends, the mortal part of
George Eliot was covered with flowers and lovingly laid beside the
husband of her youth. Wreaths of flowers conceal the mound, and out of
it rises a monument of gray granite bearing her name and years and the
lines
"Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence."
From the terraces above her bed we look over the busy metropolis, astir
with its myriad pulses of life and passion, while its rumble and din
sound in our ears in a murmurous monotone. As we linger amid the
lengthening shadows until the sunset glory fades out of the sky above
the heath and the lights of London gleam mistily through the smoke, we
rejoice that we find the tomb of George Eliot, not in the aisles of
Westminster, where some would have laid her, but in this open place,
where the winds sigh a requiem through the swaying boughs, the birds
swirl and twitter in the free azure above, and the silent stars nightly
watch over her grave.
BY SOUTHWARK AND THAMES-SIDE TO CHELSEA
_Chaucer--Shakespeare--Dickens--Walpole--Pepys--Eliot--Rossetti--
Carlyle--Hunt--Gay--Smollett--Kingsley--Herbert--Dorset--Addison--
Shaftesbury--Locke--Bolingbroke--Pope--Richardson, etc._
[Sidenote: The Tabard--White Hart--Marshalsea]
If our way to Southwark be that of the pilgrims of Chaucer's time, by
the London Bridge, we have on our right the dark reach of river where
Lizzie Hexam was discovered in the opening of "Our Mutual Friend,"
rowing the boat of the bird of prey; on the right, too, we see the Iron
Bridge where "Little Dorrit" dismissed young Chivery; and a few steps
bring us to a scene of another of Dickens's romances, the landing-stairs
at the end of London Bridge, where Nancy had the interview with "Oliver
Twist's" friends which cost the outcast her life. Here, too, the boy
Dickens used to await admission to the Marshalsea, often in company with
the little servant of his father's family who figures in his fiction as
the "orfling" of the Micawber household and the "Marchioness" of the
Brass establishment in Bevis Marks. In the adjacent church of St.
Saviour, part of which was standing when the Father of English poetry
sojourned in the near Tabard inn, is the effigied tomb of the poet
Gower, a friend of Chaucer; here also lie buried Shakespeare's brother
Edmund, an actor; Fletcher the dramatist, who lived close by; and
Lawrence Fletcher, coparcener of Shakespeare in the Globe Theatre, which
stood near at hand, on a portion of the site of the brewery which Dr.
Johnson, executor of his friend Thrale, sold to Barclay and Perkins. The
extensions of this establishment now cover the site of a church where
Baxter preached, and the sepulchre of Cruden, author of the
"Concordance." In near-by Zoar Street, Bunyan preached in a large chapel
near the Falcon tavern, which was a resort of Shakespeare. Of the Tabard
inn, whence Chaucer's Canterbury company set out, the pilgrim of to-day
finds naught save the name on the sign of the new tavern which marks its
site on Borough High Street; and the picturesque White Hart, which stood
near by--an inn known to Shakespeare and mentioned in his dramas--where
Jingle of "Pickwick," eloping with Miss Wardle, was overtaken and Sam
Weller discovered, was not long ago degraded into a vulgar dram-shop.
Near St. Thomas's Church in this neighborhood formerly stood the
hospital in which Akenside was physician and Keats a student. A little
farther along the High Street we come to a passage at the left leading
into a paved yard which was the court of the Marshalsea, and the high
wall at the right is believed to have been a part of the old prison
where Dickens's father was confined in the rooms which the novelist
assigns to William Dorrit, and where "Little Dorrit" was born and
reared. In this court the Dickens children played, and under yonder pump
by the wall Pancks cooled his head on a memorable occasion. Just beyond
is St. George's Church, where "Little Dorrit" was baptized and married,
with its vestry where she once slept with the register under her head;
adjoining is the church-yard, once overlooked by the prison-windows of
Dickens and Dorrit, where the disconsolate young Chivery expected to be
untimely laid under a lugubrious epitaph. Another block brings us to
dingy Lant Street--"out of Hight Street, right side the way"--where the
boy Dickens lived in the back attic of the same shabby house in which
Bob Sawyer afterward lodged and gave the party to Pickwick. Beyond the
next turning stood King's Bench Prison, where Micawber was incarcerated
by his stony-hearted creditors, and beyond this again we come to the
tabernacle where Spurgeon preached. Turning at the site of Micawber's
prison, the Borough Road conducts us, by the sponging-house where Hook
was confined, to the Christ Church of Newman Hall,--successor to Rowland
Hill: it is a beautiful edifice, erected largely by contributions from
America, its handsome tower being designed as a monument to Abraham
Lincoln and marked by a memorial tablet. A little way southward, we find
among the buildings of Lambeth Palace the library of which Green, the
historian of the "English People," was long custodian, and the ancient
room where Essex and the poet Lovelace were imprisoned.
[Sidenote: Thames-Side--Shop of Jenny Wren]
[Sidenote: Old Chelsea]
Recrossing Father Thames and passing the oft-described shrines of
Westminster we come to Millbank, the region into which Copperfield and
Peggotty followed the wretched Martha and saved her from suicide. Out of
Millbank Street, a few steps by a little thoroughfare bring us into the
somnolent Smith Square in which stands the grotesque church of St. John,
where Churchill once preached,--described in "Our Mutual Friend" as a
"very hideous church with four towers, resembling some petrified monster
on its back with its legs in the air." To this place came Charley Hexam
and his school-master and Wrayburn, for here in front of the church, at
a house near the corner, Lizzie Hexam--the best of all Dickens's
women--lodged with Jenny Wren. It was a little house of two stories, and
its dingy front room--the shop of the dolls' dress-maker--later was used
as a cheap restaurant, where we once regaled ourselves with a dish of
equivocal tea while we looked about us and recognized the half-door
across which Wrayburn indolently leaned as he chatted with Lizzie, the
seat in front of the wide window where Jenny sat at her work with her
crutch leaning against the wall, the corner to which she consigned her
"bad old child" in his drunken disgrace, the stairs which led to
Lizzie's chamber,--objects all noted by the observant glance of Dickens
as he peered for a moment through the door-way. Sauntering southward by
Grosvenor Road, where Lizzie walked with her brother and Headstone, we
have beside us on the left the river, glinting and shimmering in the
morning sunlight and alive with every sort of craft that plies for trade
or pleasure. It was along these curving reaches of the Thames that the
merry parties of the olden time, destined like ourselves to Chelsea,
used to row over the miles that then intervened between London and the
ancient village, and here, too, Franklin, then a printer in Bartholomew
Close, once swam the entire distance from Chelsea to Blackfriars Bridge.
The way along which we are strolling then lay in the open country, with
leafy lanes leading aside among groves and sun-flecked fields. But woods
and fields have disappeared under compact masses of brick and mortar,
and the quaint old suburb is linked to the city by continuous streets
and structures. Contact has not altogether destroyed the distinctive
features of the ancient suburb, and we know when our walk has brought us
to its borders. Few of its thoroughfares retain the dreamful quiet of
the olden time, few of its rows of sombre and dignified dwellings have
wholly escaped the modern eruption of ornate and staring architecture;
the old and the new are curiously blended, but enough of the former
remains to remind us that Chelsea is olden and not modern, and to revive
for us the winsome associations with which the place is permeated. The
suggestion of worshipful antiquity is seen in sedate, ivy entwined
mansions of dusky-hued brick, in carefully kept old trees which in their
saplinghood knew Pepys, Johnson, or Smollett, in quaint inns whose
homely comforts were enjoyed by illustrious _habitues_ in the long ago.
[Sidenote: Walpole]
Our stroll beyond the Grosvenor Road brings us to the famous "Chelsea
Physick Garden," presented to the Apothecaries' Society by Sloane, the
founder of the British Museum, who was a medical student here; it was to
this garden that Polyphilus of the "Rambler" was going to see a new
plant in flower when he was diverted by meeting the chancellor's coach.
At the adjoining hospital dwelt the gifted Mrs. Somerville, whose
husband was a physician there; and the ancient mansion of dingy brick,
in which Walpole lived, and where Pope, Swift, Gay, and Mary Wortley
Montagu were guests, is a portion of the infirmary,--the great
drawing-room in which the brilliant company met being a hospital ward. A
little way northward, by Sloane Street, we come to Hans Place, where, at
No. 25, the sweet poetess Letitia Landon ("L. E. L.") was born in a tiny
two-storied house; she attended school in a similar house of the same
row, where Miss Mitford and the authoress of "Glenarvon" had before been
pupils. Along the river again we find beyond the hospital a passage
leading to the place of Paradise Row, where, in a little brick house,
the witching Mancini was visited by Charles II. and poetized by the
brilliant Evremond. Here, at the corner of Robinson's Lane, Pepys
visited Robarte in "the prettiest contrived house" the diarist ever saw;
not far away a comfortable old inn occupies the site of the dwelling of
the historian Faulkner, in the neighborhood where the essayist Mary
Astell--ridiculed by Swift, Addison, Steele, Smollett, and Congreve--had
her modest home. Robert Walpole's later residence stood near Queen's
Road West, and its grounds sloped to the river just below the Swan
Tavern, near the bottom of the lane now called Swan Walk. It was at
this river inn that Pepys "got affright" on being told of an eruption of
the plague in Chelsea.
[Sidenote: Homes of George Eliot and Rossetti]
For a half-mile or so westward from the Swan, picturesque Cheyne
Walk--beloved of the _literati_--stretches along the river-bank. Its
many old houses, with their solemn-visaged fronts overlooking the river,
their iron railings, dusky walls, tiled roofs, and curious
dormer-windows, are impressive survivors of a past age. At No. 4, a
substantial brick house of four stories, with battlemented roof and with
oaken carvings in the rooms, are preserved some relics of George Eliot,
for this was her last home, and here she breathed out her life in the
same room where Maclise, friend of Carlyle and Dickens, had died just a
decade before. No. 16, a spacious dwelling with curved front and finely
wrought iron railing and gate-way, was the home of Rossetti for the
twenty years preceding his death. With these panelled rooms, which he
filled with quaint and beautiful objects of art, are associated most of
the memories of the gifted poet and painter. The large lower room was
his studio, where one of his last occupations was painting a replica of
"Beata Beatrix," the portrait of his wife, whose tragic death darkened
his life. Around the fireplace in this room a brilliant company held the
nightly _seances_ which a participant styles feasts of the gods.
Through the passage at the side the famous zebu was conveyed, and
reconveyed after his assault upon the poet in the garden. The rooms
above were sometime tenanted by Meredith, Swinburne, and Rossetti's
brother and biographer, who was also Whitman's editor and advocate.
Later, the essayist Watts, to whom Rossetti dedicated his greatest work,
resided here to cherish his friend. The garden, where Rossetti kept his
odd pets and where neighbors remember to have seen him walking in
paint-bedaubed attire for hours together, is now mostly covered by a
school. At first, many luminaries of letters and art came to him
here,--Jones, Millais, Hunt, Gosse, Browning, Whistler, Morris, Oliver
Madox Brown, whose death elicited Rossetti's "Untimely Lost," and others
like them; later, when baneful narcotics had sadly changed his
temperament, he dwelt in seclusion, exercising only in his garden and
seeing such devoted friends as Watts, Knight, Hake, "The Manxman" Hall
Caine, and the gifted sister, author of "Goblin Market," etc., who was
pictured by Rossetti in his "Girlhood of Mary Virgin," and who lately
died. In his study here he produced his best work; here he revised the
poems exhumed from his wife's grave and wrote "The Stream's Secret" and
other parts of the volume which made his fame and occasioned the battle
between the bards Buchanan and Swinburne; here he wrote the magnificent
"Rose Mary," "White Ship," etc., and completed the series of sonnets
which has been pronounced "in its class the greatest gift poetry has
received since Shakespeare."
[Sidenote: Carlyle's House--Smollett--Gay]
[Sidenote: Kingsley--Herbert--Dorset]
[Sidenote: Shaftesbury--Bolingbroke]
No. 18 was the famous coffee-house and barber-shop of Sloane's servant
Salter,--called "Don Saltero" by Gay, Evremond, Steele, Smollett, and
the other wits who frequented his place. On the Embankment by this
Cheyne Walk we find the statue of Carlyle; behind it is the dull little
lane of Cheyne Row, whose quiet Carlyle thought "hardly inferior to
Craigenputtock," and here at No. 5, later 24, a plain three-storied
house of sullied brick,--even more dingy than its neighbors,--the
pessimistic sage lived, wrote, and scolded for half a century. All the
wainscoted rooms are sombre and cheerless, but the memory-haunted study
seems most depressing as we stand at Carlyle's hearth-stone and look
upon the spot where he sat to write his many books. The garden was a
pleasanter place, with bright flowers his wife planted, and the tree
under which he loved to smoke and chat. Here Tennyson lounged with him,
devoted to a long pipe and longer discourse; here Froude oft found him
on the daily visits which enabled him to picture the seer, "warts and
all;" here Dickens, Maclise, and Hunt saw him at his best, and here the
latter wrote "Jenny Kissed Me,"--Jenny being Mrs. Carlyle. To Carlyle in
this sombre home came Emerson, Ruskin, Tyndal, and a host of friends and
disciples from all lands, and hither will come an endless procession of
admirers, for many Carlyle belongings have been recovered, and the place
is to be preserved as a memorial of the stern philosopher. Around the
corner Hunt lived, in the curious little house Carlyle described, and
here he studied and wrote in the upper front room. On the next block of
the same street stood the home of Smollett, which was removed the year
that Carlyle came to dwell in the vicinage. It was a spacious mansion
which had been the Lawrence manor-house. Smollett wrote here "Count
Fathom," "Clinker," and "Launcelot Greaves," and finished Hume's
"England." Here Garrick, Johnson, Sterne, and other starry spirits were
his guests, and here later lived the poet Gay and wrote "The Shepherd's
Week," "Rural Sports," and part of his comedies. In the cellars of some
of the houses at the top of Lawrence Street may be seen remains of the
ovens of the once famous Chelsea china-factory, where Dr. Johnson
wrought for some time vainly trying to master the art of
china-making,--his pieces always cracking in the oven: a service of
china presented to him by the factorymen here was preserved in Holland
House. A tasteful Queen Anne mansion with beautiful interior
decorations, not far from the Carlyle house, was a domicile of the poet
and aesthete Oscar Wilde. In the picturesque rectory of St. Luke's, a few
rods north from Cheyne Row, the author of "Hypatia" and his scarcely
less famed brother Henry, of "Ravenshoe," lived as boys, their father
being the incumbent of the parish. Henry Kingsley presents, in his
"Hillyars and Burtons," charming sketches of Chelsea as it existed in
his boyhood. Overlooking the river at the foot of the adjoining street,
we find Chelsea Church, one of the most curious and interesting of
London's many fanes, albeit partially disfigured by modern changes. In
its pulpit Donne, the poet-divine, preached at the funeral of the mother
of George Herbert; at its altar the dramatist Colman was married. Among
its many monuments we find the mural tablet of Sir Thomas More, a marble
slab with an inscription by himself which formerly described him as
"harassing to thieves, murderers, and heretics." Here lie the ancestors
of the poet Sidney, and in the little church-yard are the graves of
Shadwell the laureate, who died just back of the church, of the
publisher of "Junius," and of a brother of Fielding. Leading back from
the river here is Church Street, on which dwelt Swift, Atterbury, and
Arbuthnot, while Steele had a little house near by. The next street is
named for Sir John Danvers, whose house was at the top of the little
street: his wife was the mother of the poet Herbert, who dwelt here for
a time and wrote some of his earlier poems; Donne and the amiable angler
Izaak Walton were frequent guests of Herbert's mother in this place. The
adjacent street marks the place of Beaufort House, the palatial
residence of Sir Thomas More, where he was visited by his much-married
monarch; where the learned and colloquial author of "Encomium Moriae,"
Erasmus, was sometime an inmate; and where, decades later, Thomas
Sackville, Earl Dorset, wrote the earliest English tragedy, "Gorboduc."
A time-worn structure between King's Road and the Thames was once the
home of the bewitching Nell Gwynne, and in later years "became (not
inappropriately) a gin-temple," as Carlyle said: this old edifice was
also sometime occupied by Addison. Back of King's Road we find the
venerable Shaftesbury House,--in which the famous earl wrote
"Characteristics," Locke began his "Essay," and Addison produced some of
his Spectator papers,--long transformed into a workhouse, in the grounds
of which we are shown the place of "Locke's yew," recently removed. The
Old World's End Tavern, by Riley Street, was the notorious resort of
Congreve's "Love for Love;" the once ill-famed Cremorne Gardens, just
beyond, were erst part of the estate of a granddaughter of William Penn,
who was related to the Penns of Stoke-Pogis, where Gray wrote the
"Elegy." A near-by little ivy-grown brick house, with wide windows in
its front and an iron balcony upon its roof, was long the home of
Turner, and in the upper room, through whose arched window he could look
out upon the river, he died. From the water-edge here we see, upon the
opposite shore, the old church where Blake was married and Bolingbroke
was buried, and from whose vestry window Turner made his favorite
sketches; near by is a portion of the ancient house where Bolingbroke
was born and died, where he entertained such guests as Chesterfield,
Swift, and Pope, and where the latter wrote part of the "Essay on Man."
Beyond Chelsea we find at Fulham the spot where lived and died
Richardson, who is said to have written "Clarissa Harlowe" here; and,
near the river, the place of the home of Hook, and his mural tablet in
the old church by which he lies, near the grave of the poet Vincent
Bourne. Our ramble by Thames-side may be pleasantly prolonged through a
region rife with the associations we esteem most precious. Our way lies
among the sometime haunts of Cowley, Bulwer, Pepys, Thomson, Marryat,
Pope, Hogarth, Tennyson, Fielding, "Junius," Garrick, and many another
shining one. Some of lesser genius dwell now incarnate in this
memory-haunted district by the river-side,--the radical Labouchere,
living in Pope's famous villa, Stephens, and the author of "Aurora
Floyd,"--but it is the memory of the mighty dead that impresses us as we
saunter amid the scenes they loved and which inspired or witnessed the
work for which the world gives them honor and homage; we find their
accustomed resorts, the rural habitations where many of them dwelt and
died, the dim church aisles or the turf-grown graves where they are laid
at last in the dreamless sleep whose waking we may not know.
THE SCENE OF GRAY'S ELEGY
_The Country Church-Yard--Tomb of Gray--Stoke-Pogis Church--Reverie
and Reminiscence--Scenes of Milton--Waller--Porter--Coke--Denham._
[Sidenote: The Country Church-Yard]
Our visit to the country church-yard where the ashes of Gray repose amid
the scenes his muse immortalized is the culmination and the fitting end
of a literary pilgrimage westward from London to Windsor and the nearer
shrines of Thames-vale. Our way has led us to the sometime homes of
Pope, Fielding, Shelley, Garrick, Burke, Richardson; to the birthplaces
of Waller and Gibbon, the graves of "Junius," Hogarth, Thomson, and
Penn; to the cottage where Jane Porter wrote her wondrous tales, and the
ivy-grown church where Tennyson was married. Nearer the scene of the
"Elegy" we visit other shrines: the Horton where Milton wrote his
earlier works, "Masque of Comus," "Lycidas," "Arcades;" the Hallbarn
where Waller composed the panegyric to Cromwell, the "Congratulation,"
and other once famous poems; the mansion where the Herschels studied and
wrote. We have had the gray spire of Stoke-Pogis Church in view during
this last day of our ramble. From the summit of the "Cooper's Hill" of
Denham's best-known poem, from the battlements of Windsor and the
windows of Eton, from the elm-shaded meads that border the Thames and
the fields redolent of lime-trees and new-mown hay where we loitered, we
have had tempting glimpses of that "ivy-mantled tower" that made us wish
the winged hours more swift; for we have purposely deferred our visit to
that sacred spot so that the even-tide and the hour the curfew tolled
"the knell of parting day" across this peaceful landscape may find us
amid the old graves where "the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep." As
we approach through verdant lanes bordered by fields where the ploughman
is yet at his toil and the herds feed among the buttercups, the abundant
ivy upon the tower gleams in the light of the declining sun, and the
"yew-tree's shade" falls far aslant upon the mouldering turf-heaps. The
sequestered God's-acre, consecrated by the genius of Gray, lies in
languorous solitude, far removed from the highway and within the
precincts of a grand park once the possession of descendants of Penn.
Just without the enclosure stands a cenotaph erected by John Penn,
grandson of the founder of Pennsylvania; it represents a sarcophagus and
is ostensibly commemorative of Gray, but, as has been said, it
"resembles nothing so much as a huge tea-caddy," and its inscription
celebrates the builder more than the bard. Within the church-yard all
is rest and peace; the strife and fever of life intrude not here; no
sound of the busy world breaks in upon the hush that pervades this spot,
and "all the air a solemn stillness holds." Something of the serenity
which here pervades earth and sky steals into and uplifts the soul, and
the demons of greed and passion are subdued and silenced as we stand
above the tomb of Gray and realize all the imagery of the "Elegy." While
our hearts are thrilling with the associations of the place and the
hour, while the ashes of the tender poet rest at our feet and the
objects that inspired the matchless poem surround us, we may hope to
share in some measure the tenderer emotions to which the contemplation
of this scene stirred his soul. As we ponder these objects, upon which
his loving vision lingered, they seem strangely familiar; we feel that
we have known them long and will love them alway.
One must visit this spot if he would appreciate the absolute fidelity to
nature of the "Elegy:" its imagery is the exact reproduction of the
scene lying about us, which is practically unchanged since that time so
long ago when Gray drafted his poem here. Above us rises the square
tower, mantled with ivy and surmounted by a tapering spire whose shadow
now falls athwart the grave of the poet; here are the rugged elms with
their foliage swaying in the summer breeze above the lowly graves;
yonder by the church porch is the dark yew whose opaque shade covers the
site of the poet's accustomed seat on the needle-carpeted sward; around
us are scattered the mouldering heaps beneath which, "each in his narrow
cell forever laid," sleep the rustic dead. Some of the humble mounds are
unmarked by any token of memory or grief, but many bear the "frail
memorials," often rude slabs of wood, which loving but unskilled hands
have graven with "uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture," with the
names and years of the unhonored dead, and "many a holy text that teach
the rustic moralist to die." Some of these lowly graves hold the
forefathers of families who, not content with the sequestered vale of
life which sufficed for these simple folk, have sought on another shore
largesses of fame or fortune unattainable here. Among the names "spelled
by the unlettered muse" upon the stones around us we see those of
Goddard, Perry, Gould, Cooper, Geer, and many others familiar to our
American ears. The overarching glades of the woods which skirt the
sacred precinct were the haunt of the "youth to fortune and to fame
unknown;" the nodding beech, that "wreathes its old fantastic roots so
high" in the grove at near-by Burnham, was his favorite tree, as it was
that of Gray; afar through the haze of a golden after-glow we see the
"antique towers" of Eton, the stately brow of Windsor, with its royal
battlements, and nearer the wave of woods and fields and all the
dream-like beauty of the landscape upon which the eyes of Gray so often
dwelt, a landscape that literally glimmers in the fading light.
[Sidenote: Tomb of Gray]