inscribed, "Opposite this stone, in the same tomb upon which he so
feelingly recorded his grief at the loss of a beloved parent, are
deposited the remains of Thomas Gray, author of the Elegy written in a
Country Church-yard." A few feet distant is the tomb he erected for his
mother, which now conceals the ashes of the gentle poet. It is of the
plainest and simplest, a low structure of brick, covered by a marble
slab. No "storied urn or animated bust" is needed to perpetuate the name
of him who made himself immortal; even his name is not graven upon the
marble. We are come directly from the splendors of the royal chapels of
Windsor, where costly sculpture, gilding, and superlative epitaphs mark
the sepulchres of some who were mediocre or mendicant of mind and
virtue, and we are, therefore, the more impressed by the fitting
simplicity of the poet's tomb among the humble dead whose artless tale
he told. At the grave of Gray, how tawdry seems the pomp of those kingly
mausoleums, how mean some of the lives the bedizened monuments
commemorate, of how little consequence that the world should know where
such dust is hid from sight! At the grave of Gray, if anywhere the wide
world round, we will correctly value the vanities, ambitions, and
rewards of earth. Gray's desire to be buried here saved him from what
some one has called the "misfortune of burial in Westminster." While the
pilgrim vainly seeks in that national mausoleum the tombs of
Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Gray, Wordsworth, Thackeray, Coleridge,
Eliot, and others of divine genius, and finds instead the graves of many
sordid and impure, entombment there may be a misfortune. Happily the
poet of the Elegy reposes in his church-yard, beside the beings he best
loved, on the spot he frequented in life and hallowed by his genius,
among those whose virtues he sang; here his grave perpetually emphasizes
the sublime teachings of his verse and affords a most touching
association. The only inscription upon the slab is the poet's tribute to
his aunt, Mary Antrobus, and to "Dorothy Gray, the careful and tender
mother of many children, of whom one alone had the misfortune to
survive her." It has been our pleasure on a previous day to seek out
amid the din of London the spot where, in a modest dwelling, this mother
gave birth to the poet, and where she and Mary Antrobus sold laces to
maintain the "many children."
[Illustration: STOKE-POGIS CHURCH]
[Sidenote: The Ivy-Mantled Church]
Set upon a gentle eminence in the midst of this peaceful scene, the
church has a picturesque beauty which harmonizes well with its
environment. It is low and sombre, but age has given a dignity and grace
which would make it attractive apart from its associations. Overrunning
the walls, shrouding the crumbling battlements of the tower, clambering
along the steep roofs, clinging to the highest gables, and festooning
the stained windows, are masses of dark ivy, which conceal the inroads
of time and impart to the whole structure a beauty that wins us
completely. The tower is early English, the chancel is Norman, and the
newer portions of the edifice were already old when Gray frequented the
place. A path bordered by abundant roses leads from the gate-way of the
enclosure to the quaint porch of timbers and the entrance to the church.
Within, the light falls dimly at this hour upon the curious little
galleries of the peasantry, the great pew of the Penns, the humbler
place at the end of the south aisle where Gray came to pray, the huge
mural tablet and the burial vault where the son of William Penn and his
family sleep in death. In the park close by is the palace of the Penns,
and the mansion where Charles I. was imprisoned and where Coke wrote
some of his Commentaries and entertained his queen. Not far distant is
the house--now a fine abode--which Gray shared for some years with his
mother and aunt, and where his bedroom and study may still be seen.
Farther away are the Beaconsfield which furnished the title of the
gifted author of "Lothair," and the old church where Burke and Waller
await the resurrection.
[Sidenote: Discarded Stanzas]
In the twilight we hastily sketch Gray's "ivy-mantled tower," and then
sit by his tomb gazing upon the fading landscape and recalling the life
of this divine poet and the lines of the matchless poem which was
drafted here and with exquisite care revised and polished year after
year before it was given to the world. It may not be generally known
that he discarded six stanzas from the original draft,--among them this,
written as the fourth stanza:
"Hark, how the sacred calm that breathes around
Bids every fierce, tumultuous passion cease;
In still small accents whispering from the ground
A grateful earnest of eternal peace;"
this, from the reply of the "hoary-headed swain:"
"Him have we seen the greenwood side along
While o'er the heath we hied, our labor done,
Oft as the wood-lark piped her farewell song
With wistful eyes pursue the setting sun;"
and this, from the description of the poet's grave:
"There scattered oft, the earliest of the year,
By hands unseen, are showers of violets found;
The redbreast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground."
We may judge what was the high standard of Gray, and what the
transcending quality of the finished poem from which its author could,
after years of deliberation, reject such stanzas. The Elegy is the
expression in divinest poetry of the best conceptions of a noble soul
upon the most serious topic on which human thought can dwell. No wonder
that the world has literally learned by heart those precious lines; that
they are the solace of the thoughtful and the bereft in every clime
where mortals meditate on death; that the brave Wolfe, on the way to his
triumphal death, should recite them in the darkness and declare he had
rather be their author than the victor in the morrow's battle; that the
great Webster, on his death-bed, should beg to hear them, and die at
last with their melody sounding in his ears.
As the glow fades out of the darkening sky, the birds in the leafy elms
one by one cease their songs, "the lowing herds wind slowly o'er the
lea" to distant folds, the "drowsy tinklings" grow fainter, the summer
wind sighing among the trees dies with the day, and the scene which
seemed still before is noiseless now. In this hush we are content to
leave this deathless poet and the spot he loved. We gather ivy from the
old wall and a spray from the boughs of his dreaming yew, and take our
way back to the busy haunts of men.
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._
[Sidenote: Gad's Hill House]
"To go to Gad's Hill," said Dickens, in a note of invitation, "you leave
Charing Cross at nine o'clock by North Kent Railway for Higham." Guided
by these directions and equipped with a letter from Dickens's son, we
find ourselves gliding eastward among the chimneys of London and, a
little later, emerging into the fields of Kent,--Jingle's region of
"apples, cherries, hops, and women." The Thames is on our left; we pass
many river-towns,--Dartford where Wat Tyler lived, Gravesend where
Pocahontas died,--but most of our way is through the open country, where
we have glimpses of fields, parks, and leafy lanes, with here and there
picturesque camps of gypsies or of peripatetic rascals "goin'
a-hoppin'." From wretched Higham a walk of half an hour among orchards
and between hedges of wild-rose and honeysuckle brings us to the hill
which Shakespeare and Dickens have made classic ground, and soon we see,
above the tree-tops, the glittering vane which surmounted the home of
the world's greatest novelist. The name Gad's (vagabond's) Hill is a
survival of the time when the depredations of highwaymen upon "pilgrims
going to Canterbury with rich offerings and traders riding to London
with fat purses" gave to this spot the ill repute it had in
Shakespeare's day: it was here he located Falstaff's great exploit. The
tuft of evergreens which crowns the hill about Dickens's retreat is the
remnant of thick woods once closely bordering the highway, in which the
"men in buckram" lay concealed, and the robbery of the franklin was
committed in front of the spot where the Dickens house stands. By this
road passed Chaucer, who had property near by, gathering from the
pilgrims his "Canterbury Tales." In all time to come the great master of
romance who came here to live and die will be worthily associated with
Shakespeare and Chaucer in the renown of Gad's Hill. In becoming
possessor of this place, Dickens realized a dream of his boyhood and an
ambition of his life. In one of his travellers' sketches he introduces a
"queer small boy" (himself) gazing at Gad's Hill House and predicting
his future ownership, which the author finds annoying "because it
happens to be _my_ house and I believe what he said was true." When at
last the place was for sale, Dickens did not wait to examine it; he
never was inside the house until he went to direct its repair. Eighteen
hundred pounds was the price; a thousand more were expended for
enlargement of the grounds and alterations of the house, which, despite
his declaration that he had "stuck bits upon it in all manner of ways,"
did not greatly change it from what it was when it became the goal of
his childish aspirations. At first it was his summer residence
merely,--his wife came with him the first summer,--but three years later
he sold Tavistock House, and Gad's Hill was thenceforth his home. From
the bustle and din of the city he returned to the haunts of his boyhood
to find restful quiet and time for leisurely work among these "blessed
woods and fields" which had ever held his heart. For nine years after
the death of Dickens Gad's Hill was occupied by his oldest son; its
ownership has since twice or thrice changed.
[Sidenote: Gad's Hill--House and Grounds]
[Sidenote: Dickens's Chalet]
Its elevated site and commanding view render it one of the most
conspicuous, as it is one of the most lovely, spots in Kent. The mansion
is an unpretentious, old-fashioned, two-storied structure of fourteen
rooms. Its brick walls are surmounted by Mansard roofs above which rises
a bell-turret; a pillared portico, where Dickens sat with his family on
summer evenings, shades the front entrance; wide bay-windows project
upon either side; flowers and vines clamber upon the walls, and a
delightfully home-like air pervades the place. It seems withal a modest
seat for one who left half a million dollars at his death. At the right
of the entrance-hall we see Dickens's library and study, a cosy room
shown in the picture of "The Empty Chair:" here are shelves which held
his books; the panels he decorated with counterfeit book-backs; the nook
where perched the mounted remains of his raven, the "Grip" of "Barnaby
Rudge." By this bay-window, whence he could look across the lawn to the
cedars beyond the highway, stood his chair and the desk where he wrote
many of the works by which the world will know him alway. Behind the
study was his billiard-room, and upon the opposite side of the hall the
parlor, with the dining-room adjoining it at the back, both bedecked
with the many mirrors which delighted the master. Opening out of these
rooms is a conservatory, paid for out of "the golden shower from
America" and completed but a few days before Dickens's death, holding
yet the ferns he tended. The dining-room was the scene of much of that
emphatic hospitality which it pleased the novelist to dispense, his
exuberant spirits making him the leader in all the jollity and
conviviality of the board. Here he compounded for bibulous guests his
famous "cider-cup of Gad's Hill," and at the same table he was stricken
with death; on a couch beneath yonder window, the one nearest the hall,
he died on the anniversary of the railway accident which so frightfully
imperilled his life. From this window we look out upon a lawn decked
with shrubbery and see across undulating cornfields his beloved Cobham.
From the parquetted hall, stairs lead to the modest chambers,--that of
Dickens being above the drawing-room. He lined the stairway with prints
of Hogarth's works, and declared he never came down the stairs without
pausing to wonder at the sagacity and skill which had produced the
masterful pictures of human life. The house is invested with roses, and
parterres of the red geraniums which the master loved are ranged upon
every side. It was some fresh manifestation of his passion for these
flowers that elicited from his daughter the averment, "Papa, I think
when you are an angel your wings will be made of looking-glasses and
your crown of scarlet geraniums." Beneath a rose-tree not far from the
window where Dickens died, a bed blooming with blue lobelia holds the
tiny grave of "Dick" and the tender memorial of the novelist to that
"Best of Birds." The row of gleaming limes which shadow the porch was
planted by Dickens's own hands. The pedestal of the sundial upon the
lawn is a massive balustrade of the old stone bridge at near-by
Rochester, which little David Copperfield crossed "foot-sore and weary"
on his way to his aunt, and from which Pickwick contemplated the
castle-ruin, the cathedral, the peaceful Medway. At the left of the
mansion are the carriage-house and the school-room of Dickens's sons. In
another portion of the grounds are his tennis-court and the
bowling-green which he prepared, where he became a skilful and tireless
player. The broad meadow beyond the lawn was a later purchase, and the
many limes which beautify it were rooted by Dickens. Here numerous
cricket matches were played, and he would watch the players or keep the
score "the whole day long." It was in this meadow that he rehearsed his
readings, and his talking, laughing, weeping, and gesticulating here
"all to himself" excited among his neighbors suspicion of his insanity.
From the front lawn a tunnel constructed by Dickens passes beneath the
highway to "The Wilderness," a thickly wooded shrubbery, where
magnificent cedars uprear their venerable forms and many sombre firs,
survivors of the forest which erst covered the countryside, cluster upon
the hill-top. Here Dickens's favorite dog, the "Linda" of his letters,
lies buried. Amid the leafy seclusion of this retreat, and upon the very
spot where Falstaff was routed by Hal and Poins ("the eleven men in
buckram"), Dickens erected the chalet sent to him in pieces by Fechter,
the upper room of which--up among the quivering boughs, where "birds and
butterflies fly in and out, and green branches shoot in at the
windows"--Dickens lined with mirrors and used as his study in summer. Of
the work produced at Gad's Hill--"Two Cities," "Uncommercial Traveller,"
"Mutual Friend," "Edwin Drood," and many tales and sketches of "All the
Year Round"--much was written in this leaf-environed nook; here the
master wrought through the golden hours of his last day of conscious
life, here he wrote his last paragraph and at the close of that June day
let fall his pen, never to take it up again. From the place of the
chalet we behold the view which delighted the heart of Dickens,--his
desk was so placed that his eyes would rest upon this view whenever he
raised them from his work,--the fields of waving corn, the green expanse
of meadows, the sail-dotted river.
Many friends came to Dickens in this pleasant Kentish home,--Forster,
Maclise, Reade, Macready, Leech, Collins, Yates, Hans Christian
Andersen, Mr. and Mrs. Fields, Longfellow and his daughters, Fechter and
his wife: some of them were guests here for many days together. The
master was the most genial of hosts, apparently the happiest of men,
with the hearty laugh which Montaigne says never comes from a bad heart.
After the morning task in library or chalet he gave the rest of the day
to exercise and recreation, often at games with his guests in the
grounds, but taking daily in rain or shine the long walks which made his
lithe figure and rapid gait familiar to all the cottagers and
field-laborers of the countryside. It is pleasant to hear the loving
testimony of these simple folk--many of them descendants of the "men of
Kent" who followed the standard of Wat Tyler from Blackheath to
London--concerning Dickens's uniform kindness, his helpful generosity,
his scrupulous regard of the rights of inferiors, the traits which won
their hearts. One rustic neighbor declares, "Dickens was a main good
man, sir: it was a sorry day for the neighborhood when he was taken
away." Near the gate of Gad's Hill House is a wayside inn, the "Sir John
Falstaff," which for more than two centuries has stood for remembrance
of that worthy's exploit at this place. Its weather-worn sign bears
portraits of Falstaff and Prince Hal and a picture of the "Merry Wives
of Windsor" putting Falstaff into the basket. The name of a son of the
recent keeper of this hostelry, Edward Trood, doubtless suggested the
title of the "Mystery" which must, alas! remain a mystery evermore.
[Sidenote: Scenes of Great Expectations]
[Sidenote: The Marshes]
From the inn a lane leads to a sightly summit surmounted by a monument
which Dickens called "Andersen's Monument," because it was the resort of
that illustrious author while a guest at Gad's Hill. Its far-reaching
prospect is indeed alluring: on every hand vast, wave-like expanses of
forest and orchard, moor and mead, sweep away to the horizon, while
northward, beyond great cornfields and market-gardens, we see twenty
miles of the Thames--"stealing steadily away to the ocean, like a man's
life"--bordered here by a wilderness of low-lying marsh. A walk beloved
of Dickens brings us to one of his favorite haunts,--a dreary
church-yard on the margin of this marsh. It lies in the dismal,
ague-haunted "hundred of Loo," a peninsula between the Thames and the
Medway having a broad hem of desolate fens along the river-banks--a
weird, little known region, whose ancient reputation was unsavory. A
wooden finger on a post directs us to Cooling,--Dickens makes Pip say
that this direction was never accepted, no one ever came,--a forlorn
hamlet which straggles about the ruins of Cooling Castle. This was an
ancient seat of the Cobhams; through a Cobham heiress it passed to
Oldcastle, leader of the Lollards, who shut himself up here and was
dragged hence to martyrdom. It is noteworthy that this Oldcastle has
been thought to be the original of Falstaff, the hero of Gad's Hill. Of
the stronghold little remains save the machicolated gate-way, flanked
with ponderous round towers bearing quaint inscriptions. The water of
the moat is green and stagnant, suggesting frogs and rheumatism, and the
space it encloses is occupied by the cottage of a farmer. The forge and
cottage of Joe Gargery are not found in the wretched village,--indeed,
we should be sorry to find that splendid fellow and the good Betty so
poorly housed,--but beyond the narrow street and at the verge of the
marshes we come to a low, quaint, square-towered old church, which rises
from a wind-swept, nettle-grown church-yard, the scene of the opening
chapter of "Great Expectations." Yonder mound, whose gravestone is
inscribed to George Comfort, "Also Sarah, Wife of the Above," stands for
the tomb of Pip's parents; and sunken in the grass at our feet is the
row of little gravestones whose curious shape led Pip to believe that
his little brothers (whose graves they marked) "had been born on their
backs, with their hands in their trousers pockets, and had never taken
them out in this stage of existence." Over this low wall which divides
God's-acre from the marshes the convict climbed, and we, standing upon
it, look across the scene of his chase and capture, which Pip witnessed
from Joe's back. On this sombre autumn afternoon of our visit the
landscape is startlingly like that the terrified boy beheld: we see the
same far-stretching waste of marshes, the intersecting dikes, the low,
leaden line of the river beyond, dark mists hanging heavy over all,
while the chill wind blows in our faces from its "savage lair" in the
sea. Upon yonder flat tombstone in the far corner of the church-yard
Dickens sat and lunched with Fields when he last walked to this place.
Hidden now in the mists, but not far distant, and reached by a foot-path
from the road to Chalk, is a dirty and dilapidated Thames-side inn,
whose creaking sign-board reads, "Ship and Lobster:" this is The Ship of
"Great Expectations," where Pip and his party slept the night preceding
their attempt to put Magwich on the steamer, and the open river below
the little causeway is the scene of their mischance and the transport's
recapture.
[Sidenote: Cobham]
[Sidenote: Cloisterham]
The walk which Dickens most enjoyed--the one which was his last before
he died--was to and around Cobham, the seat of his friend Darnley. We
follow the way once so familiar to his feet, through the noble park
which the Pickwick Club found "so thoroughly delightful," on a June
afternoon, by the stately old hall where lately stood Dickens's chalet,
and farther, through majestic forest and open glade, to the place whence
Pickwick--overcome by cold punch--was wheeled to the pound. Skirting the
park on our return, we come to Cobham village and the neat Leather
Bottle Inn to which the lovelorn Tupman retired to conceal his woe after
his discomfiture at Manor Farm, and where Dickens himself, rambling in
the neighborhood with Forster, lodged in 1841. Here is the little
church-yard where Pickwick walked with Tupman and persuaded him to
return to the world, and hard by the cottage of Bill Stumps, before
which Pickwick made the immortal discovery which was "the pride of his
friends and the envy of every antiquarian in this or any other country."
Another favorite walk of Dickens conducts us, past a quaint, rambling
mansion of dingy brick which served as the model for Satis House of
"Great Expectations," to Rochester, the Cloisterham of "Edwin Drood."
Here we find the Bull Inn,--"good house, nice beds,"--where the Pickwick
Club lodged, in rooms 13 and 19, and the ballroom, where Tupman and
Jingle (the latter in Winkle's coat) danced with the widow and enraged
little Slammer; the Watt's Charity of "The Uncommercial Traveller;" the
picturesque castle-ruin which Dickens frequented and has so charmingly
described. Here, too, is the gray old cathedral he loved, which appears
in many of his tales, from Jingle's piquant account of it in "Pickwick"
to that touching description of this ancient fane in the last lines of
the master, written within sound of its bells and but a few hours before
his death.
[Sidenote: Land of Dickens]
This region of sunny Kent, the scene of his earliest and latest years,
may fitly be called The Land of Dickens, so intimately is it associated
with his life and work. Here at near-by Chatham (whence he used to come
to gaze longingly at Gad's Hill House), in a whitewashed cottage on
Ordnance Place, he lived as a child; at yonder village of Chalk he spent
his honeymoon, its expenses being defrayed by the sale of the first
numbers of "Pickwick;" here were the habitual resorts of his holiday
leisure; here was his latest home; here he died, and here he desired to
be buried. This district was no less the life-haunt and home of his
imagination and genius. The scenes of his most effective romances are
laid here; into the fabric of many a tale and sketch his fancy has woven
the familiar features of town and hamlet, field and forest, marsh and
river, of the region he knew and loved so well; here his first tale
opens, here his last tale ends.
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._
[Sidenote: London Homes]
Of the places in and about great London which were associated with the
brief life of Byron, the rage for improvement which holds nothing sacred
has spared a few, and the quest for Byron-haunts is still fairly
rewarded. Holles Street, where he was born, has not long been resigned
to trade: we have known it as a somnolent little street whose grateful
quiet--reached by a step from the tumult of De Quincey's "stony-hearted
step-mother"--made it seem like a placid pool beside a riotous torrent.
It is scarce a furlong in length, and from the shade of Cavendish Square
at its extremity we could look, between bordering rows of modest
dwellings, to the square where Ralph Nickleby lived and Mary Wortley
Montagu died. At our right, a little way down the street, stood a small,
plain, two-storied house of dingy brick, where the poet's mother lodged
in the upper front room at the time of his birth. This dwelling was No.
16, later 24, and has now given place to a shop. An unpretentious
tenement near Sloane Square was Byron's home during his pupilage with
Dr. Glennie.