WARWICK AND KENILWORTH
All the way from London to Warwick it rained; not heavily, but with a
gentle fall. The gray clouds hung low over the landscape and softly
darkened it; so that meadows of scarlet and emerald, the shining foliage
of elms, gray turret, nestled cottage and limpid river were as
mysterious and evanescent as pictures seen in dreams. At Warwick the
rain had fallen and ceased, and the walk from the station to the inn was
on a road--or on a footpath by the roadside--still hard and damp with
the water it had absorbed. A fresh wind blew from the fields, sweet with
the rain and fragrant with the odour of leaves and flowers. The streets
of the ancient town--entered through an old Norman arch--were deserted
and silent. It was Sunday when I first came to the country of
Shakespeare; and over all the region there brooded a sacred stillness
peculiar to the time and harmonious beyond utterance with the sanctity
of the place. As I strive, after many days, to call back and to fix in
words the impressions of that sublime experience, the same awe falls
upon me now that fell upon me then. Nothing else upon earth--no natural
scene, no relic of the past, no pageantry of the present--can vie with
the shrine of Shakespeare, in power to impress, to humble, and to exalt
the devout spirit that has been nurtured at the fountain of his
transcendent genius.
A fortunate way to approach Stratford-on-Avon is by Warwick and
Kenilworth. Those places are not on a direct line of travel; but the
scenes and associations that they successively present are such as
assume a symmetrical order, increase in interest, and grow to a
delightful culmination. Objects that Shakespeare himself must have seen
are still visible there; and little by little, in contact with these,
the pilgrim through this haunted region is mentally saturated with that
atmosphere of serenity and romance in which the youth of Shakespeare was
passed, and by which his works and his memory are embalmed. No one
should come abruptly upon the poet's home. The mind needs to be prepared
for the impression that awaits it; and in this gradual approach it finds
preparation, both suitable and delicious. The luxuriance of the country,
its fertile fields, its brilliant foliage, its myriads of wild-flowers,
its pomp of colour and of physical vigour and bloom, do not fail to
announce, to every mind, howsoever heedless, that this is a fit place
for the birth and nurture of a great man. But this is not all. As you
stroll in the quaint streets of Warwick, as you drive to Kenilworth, as
you muse in that poetic ruin, as you pause in the old graveyard in the
valley below, as you meditate over the crumbling fragments of the
ancient abbey, at every step of the way you are haunted by a vague sense
of an impending grandeur; you are aware of a presence that fills and
sanctifies the scene. The emotion that is thus inspired is very
glorious; never to be elsewhere felt; and never to be forgotten.
Illustration: "Warwick Castle."
The cyclopaedias and the guide-books dilate, with much particularity and
characteristic eloquence, upon Warwick Castle and other great features
of Warwickshire, but the attribute that all such records omit is the
atmosphere; and this, perhaps, is rather to be indicated than described.
The prevailing quality of it is a certain high and sweet solemnity--a
feeling kindred with the placid, happy melancholy that steals over the
mind, when, on a sombre afternoon in autumn, you stand in the
churchyard, and listen, amid rustling branches and sighing grass, to the
low music of distant organ and chanting choir. Peace, haunted by
romance, dwells here, in reverie. The great tower of Warwick, based in
silver Avon and pictured in its slumbering waters, seems musing upon the
centuries over which it has watched, and full of unspeakable knowledge
and thought. The dark and massive gateways of the town and the
timber-crossed fronts of its antique houses live on in the same strange
dream and perfect repose; and all along the drive to Kenilworth are
equal images of rest--of a rest in which there is nothing supine or
sluggish, no element of death or decay, but in which passion,
imagination, beauty, and sorrow, seized at their topmost poise, seem
crystallised in eternal calm. What opulence of splendid life is vital
for ever in Kenilworth's crumbling ruin there are no words to say. What
pomp of royal banners! what dignity of radiant cavaliers! what
loveliness of stately and exquisite ladies! what magnificence of
banquets! what wealth of pageantry! what lustre of illumination! The
same festal music that the poet Gascoigne heard there, three hundred
years ago, is still sounding on, to-day. The proud and cruel Leicester
still walks in his vaulted hall. The imperious face of the Virgin Queen
still from her dais looks down on plumed courtiers and jewelled dames;
and still the moonlight, streaming through the turret-window, falls on
the white bosom and the great, startled, black eyes of Amy Robsart,
waiting for her lover. The gaze of the pilgrim, indeed, rests only upon
old, gray, broken walls, overgrown with green moss and ivy, and pierced
by irregular casements through which the sun shines, and the winds blow,
and the rains drive, and the birds fly, amid utter desolation. But
silence and ruin are here alike eloquent and awful; and, much as the
place impresses you by what remains, it impresses you far more by what
has vanished. Ambition, love, pleasure, power, misery, tragedy--these
are gone; and being gone they are immortal. I plucked, in the garden of
Kenilworth, one of the most brilliant red roses that ever grew; and as I
pressed it to my lips I seemed to touch the lips of that superb,
bewildering beauty who outweighed England's crown (at least in story),
and whose spirit is the everlasting genius of the place.
There is a row of cottages opposite to the ruins of the castle, in which
contentment seems to have made her home. The ivy embowers them. The
roses cluster around their little windows. The greensward slopes away,
in front, from big, flat stones that are embedded in the mossy sod
before their doors. Down in the valley, hard by, your steps stray
through an ancient graveyard--in which stands the parish church, a
carefully restored building of the eleventh century, with tower, and
clock, and bell--and past a few fragments of the Abbey and Monastery of
St. Mary, destroyed in 1538. At many another point, on the roads betwixt
Warwick and Kenilworth and Stratford, I came upon such nests of cosy,
rustic quiet and seeming happiness. They build their country houses low,
in England, so that the trees overhang them, and the cool, friendly,
flower-gemmed earth--parent, and stay, and bourne of mortal life--is
tenderly taken into their companionship. Here, at Kenilworth, as
elsewhere, at such places as Marlowe, Henley, Richmond, Maidenhead,
Cookham, and the region round about Windsor, I saw many a sweet nook
where tired life might be content to lay down its burden and enter into
its rest. In all true love of country--a passion that seems to be more
deeply felt in England than anywhere else upon the globe--there is love
for the literal soil itself: and surely that sentiment in the human
heart is equally natural and pious which inspires and perpetuates man's
desire that where he found his cradle he may also find his grave.
Illustration: "Old Inn."
Under a cloudy sky and through a landscape still wet and shining with
recent rain the drive to Stratford was a pleasure so exquisite that at
last it became a pain. Just as the carriage reached the junction of the
Warwick and Snitterfield roads a ray of sunshine, streaming through a
rift in the clouds, fell upon the neighbouring hillside, scarlet with
poppies, and lit the scene as with the glory of a celestial benediction.
This sunburst, neither growing larger nor coming nearer, followed all
the way to Stratford; and there, on a sudden, the clouds were lifted and
dispersed, and "fair daylight" flooded the whole green countryside. The
afternoon sun was still high in heaven when I alighted at the Red Horse
and entered the little parlour of Washington Irving. They keep the room
much as it was when he left it; for they are proud of his gentle genius
and grateful for his commemorative words. In a corner stands [1877] the
small, old-fashioned haircloth arm-chair in which he sat, on that night
of memory and of musing which he has described in _The Sketch-Book. _A
brass plate is affixed to it, bearing his name; and the visitor
observes, in token of its age and service, that the hair-cloth of its
seat is considerably worn and frayed. Every American pilgrim to
Stratford sits in that chair; and looks with tender interest on the old
fireplace; and reads the memorials of Irving that are hung upon the
walls: and it is no small comfort there to reflect that our illustrious
countryman--whose name will be remembered with honour, as long as
literature is prized among men--was the first, in modern days, to
discover the beauties and to interpret the poetry of the birthplace of
Shakespeare.
Illustration: "Washington Irving's Parlour."
Illustration: "From the Warwick Shield."