In the house there are portents of impending change. A feeling of
clearance is in the air. There is a going-away aspect about the
furniture, pictures are down and in odd passages and corners there
are bundles and boxes of books piled up for removal. Most conclusive
of all, there is beside the gate a board bearing in large red letters
the word "Sold." It is the announcement to the world that I am on
the march to fresh woods and pastures new. They are beautiful woods
and desirable pastures. I have no doubt I shall be as happy amidst
them as a very variable temper permits me to be in this very variable
world of ours. And yet I confess that the sight of that word "Sold"
over the gate gives me an orphaned feeling. It translates itself in
my mind into "Finis"--the end of a chapter, the completion of another
long stage in a journey that seems now unconscionably short, the cold
epitaph of irrevocable things. Taking farewell of a house that has
become as familiar to you as your own shadow is like taking leave of
something of your spiritual self. It is no longer a thing of bricks
and mortar. It is compact of dreams and babbles of a thousand
forgotten things that were and will not be again. That is so of any
house where you have lived long and seen happy days; but when that
house is at Hampstead, a bow-shot from the Heath, the twinge of
parting is peculiarly sharp.
I daresay there are as pleasant places under the sun as Hampstead. I
do not know them, but I am willing to believe that there are.
Pleasanter places, I think, there cannot be. It was Happy Hampstead
in the far-off days when the Abbot and monks of Westminster used to
come hawking and hunting up its breezy heights and down into the
Forest of Middlesex beyond; it was Happy Hampstead when the gallants
and fine ladies of two hundred years ago came to Well Walk to drink
the waters and dance and philander in the greenwood, and it is Happy
Hampstead still, the hill of vision and the inexhaustible playground
of the city that spreads, vast and mysterious, at its foot. Here on
this sandy spit, with its ponds and its hollows, its birch woods and
its hawthorn bushes, its wide vistas and secret places, its sense of
the seashore and its feeling of the mountains, is the land where it
is always afternoon. Romance clings to it like an odour and mirth is
in its very atmosphere. It is the idyll of London.
And what a wealth of memories swarm around its hillsides, peopling
its quaint courts and ways, and the very gorse bushes, with the
shadows of the past. There is hardly a foot of its soil that is
without its story--Dick Turpin riding on moonlit nights over the
swarthy heath; Dick Steele taking refuge from his creditors in the
lonely cottage on Haverstock Hill, where Sir Charles Sedley had lived
before him; the famous Kit-Cat Club with Addison and all the wits of
the day holding its summer sessions hard by the Whitestone Pond;
Charles Lamb hunting among the gorse bushes for the snuff-box that he
had thrown away the day before in a mood of renunciation after a
visit with Home to the "Bull and Bush"; Shelley carrying a poor woman
whom he had found lying in the snow to Leigh Hunt's house in the Vale
of Health; Sir Harry Vane coming out of his house on Rosslyn Hill on
his last journey to the Tower; Constable's pines by the Spaniards'
Road, and the gibbet tree on which the highwaymen were hanged in
chains, that still lies where it fell above the road at North End;
Wordsworth walking up the hill to visit Joanna Baillie; and Pope
hobnobbing with Arbuthnot; Johnson, in the days of his poverty,
tramping up from Fleet Street to see his ailing wife at Frognal; the
tales of the Spaniards' Inn, where Mrs. Bardell had her party, and
where the rioters assembled for their attack on Mansfield at Ken
Wood; the great Pitt, in his madness at Pitt House; Romney nursing
his gloomy spirit at Holly Hill; Keats attending his dying brother in
Well Walk and writing his immortal odes in Wentworth Place; Crabbe----
But no, the shadows crowd too thick and fast to be recorded. I walk
amongst them with the feeling that I, too, seem about to become a
shadow, and as I leave the Heath where the children are playing
hide-and-seek among the hawthorn trees and the dogs are splashing in
the Leg of Mutton Pond and turn into a road where the one brazen word
"Sold" seems to fill the landscape, I have a vague sense of attending
a funeral. Fortunately it is my own funeral--the funeral of twenty
happy years on this sunny eminence--and not the funeral of Happy
Hampstead. Men may come and men may go, but neither time nor change
can touch the spirit of this enchanted hill.
Jane says that she will never have the heart to return to it. I feel
a bit like that myself. I feel that I shall not want to disturb the
dream into which those Hampstead days are fading. It will be enough
to remember that I too once dwelt in Arcady.