which had been running straight as a bee-line, rose and swerved a few
feet to the left, and we found that we were actually driving along the
top of the wall. For nearly five miles we followed it. There it ran as
straight as an arrow over every obstacle, with the great green ditch to
our right and the great earth-bank beyond it, a type of the resistless
determination of the great people who made it. High moorland pastures,
reclaimed from the Waste, lay on either side. In some, the sweet hay
was being cut, and the buzz of an American mowing-machine brought our
wits with a sudden shock out of the by-gone ages where they had been
wandering. In others, herds of polled Galloways, the sleek black cattle
of the Border, were grazing peacefully, without fear of moss-troopers or
cattle-thieves. Here stood a mile-castle,--four rude grass-grown banks
marking its outline,--its stones being used to build a little cottage
crouching in one corner. There an old lime-kiln, like some troll's
dwelling, broke the endless swell of green and brown. The few cottages
at the hamlet of Banks Head looked forlorn and dreary, as if they had
been dropped by mistake on the desolate wild. They are all built of
stone from the wall, which has proved an invaluable quarry to the whole
neighborhood, and, in consequence, has been ruthlessly destroyed. A
hideous fashion prevails about here. Most of the houses are whitewashed,
the stones round the doors and windows are painted black, and, with
their cold gray slate roofs or dilapidated thatch, they but add to
the dreary look of this district. It is a dismal land up there on the
Waste,--a sad, hard country, with its stone walls and boggy uplands,
that must have bred a sad, hard race, one would think. But if one looks
beyond the dreariness close at hand, what a wondrous view stretches away
all round! East, are the greenish swells and conical crests of the
Northumberland Fells; south, lie Tindale, Talkin, and Castle Carrock
Fells across the valley of the Irthing, which is marked by a line of
wood, and beyond them rise the noble group of Lake mountains. Helvellyn
and the two giants Saddleback and Skiddaw, looming up veiled in mystery
and golden haze; northward, the line of the Cheviot Hills shows that we
are looking right into Scotland; westward, across the fertile plain,
where park and pasture, river and forest, are bathed in sunshine,
Criffel rears his head above Melrose Abbey; and there, right under the
western sun, gleams a line of silver in the flat, extremest
distance,--the Solway Firth.
It was with the feeling of parting from a friend that we bade adieu to
the Roman Wall and turned downward from the bleak moorland into the rich
vegetation of the valley. The glamour of the Roman period had laid hold
upon us. We longed to follow up the course of this great barrier, to
know more of its builders, of their lives, their works, their history,
than we had ever done before. This monument of their almost superhuman
power must awaken some kind of enthusiasm in the dullest mind, and one
can echo Sir Walter Scott's words in "Guy Mannering:" "And this, then,
is the Roman Wall. What a people, whose labors even at this extremity
of their empire comprehended such space, and were executed upon a scale
of such grandeur! In future ages, when the science of war shall have
changed, how few traces will exist of the labors of Vauban and Coehorn,
while this wonderful people's remains will even then continue to
interest and astonish posterity! Their fortifications, their aqueducts,
their theatres, their fountains, all their public works, bear the grave,
solid, and majestic character of their language; while our modern
labors, like our modern tongues, seem but constructed out of their
fragments."
ENGLISH RURAL SCENERY.
SARAH B. WISTER.
[For a country rich in its verdant beauty and perfect in its
grooming, England is unsurpassed. While containing little of
the grand, it has much of the charming, and is abundantly
calculated to rest the eyes of the sight-weary traveller. We
append an enthusiastic description of this garden-land from an
American visitor.]
When we got into the country we grudged the time we had spent in London.
The true English landscape has a great and peculiar charm until the
stranger learns its secret and wearies of its sameness. Never shall I
forget the journey from Southampton to London on the day we landed.
Something must be allowed for the delight of eyes that had been looking
over endless ridges of sea-waves to the blank horizon for so long; but
what a blushing, smiling land it was that greeted them! The verdure was
the first thing that struck us,--very different from ours. There is
more blue and less yellow in it, resting and refreshing the eyes with a
cooler, deeper tone; the trees are denser in foliage too, and fuller in
form; the whole scene had a boskiness and boweriness due to innumerable
hedges, orchards, shrubberies, and plantations. Woodland, strictly
speaking, there was none,--only here and there little triangular bits,
not an acre in extent, for game-covers, or lines of tall feathery elms
with bushy heads along the hedgerows, clipped close that they might not
shut out the scanty sunshine from the farmer's field. The hawthorn was
covered with its pink-and-white blossoms, May as they call it; acres of
the gently-rolling country were crimson with Dutch clover; the laburnum,
a small, graceful tree, was full of drooping strings of delicate yellow
flowers; the banks were ablaze with scarlet poppies and golden broom.
Low-arched stone bridges spanned small brimming streams; quaint old
gate-ways opened into shady avenues; thatched cottages, beautiful
ancient parish churches with gray towers, pretty, quiet hamlets peeped
out from the luxuriant leafiness; comfortable, solid, old-fashioned
farmhouses reigned among their outbuildings and orchards; in the
distance were grand country-places, scarcely visible in the depths of
their stately parks; and, what raised our enthusiasm to the utmost,
we passed a beautiful Gothic ruin half hidden in ivy. Everything
looked trim and orderly; not an inch of ground wasted; all turned to
account for use or beauty; little vegetable-gardens on the slopes
of the railway-embankments and along the edges of the track; little
flower-gardens on both sides the station-houses, and roses and
honeysuckle trained over their porches.
This is the genuine, characteristic English scenery, and it is found in
perfection in Warwickshire. About Leamington, thanks to the contiguity
of several large estates, parts of the country are heavily wooded, and a
deep rural seclusion pervades the whole neighborhood. We were there in
July: the earlier flowers were gone, but in the green embowered lanes
the banks were rich with purple foxgloves; pale, shadowy bramble-roses
were blossoming in the hedges, over which climbed woodbine and a pure
white convolvulus; the gaudy poppies still held their own, as they do,
though with thinner ranks, to the end of the season; and the splendid
gorse spread over the uncultivated hill-sides like yellow flame. Many
birds make their home here. We came too late for the nightingales, and
it was elsewhere that we heard a cuckoo once or twice in a distant
thicket, for it is silent after June; but larks warbled in mid-air, and
thrushes filled the lanes with their liquid notes, besides a host of
little unknown birds who sang their simple song very sweetly all day.
One of the finest country-seats in the county was originally a
Cistercian abbey, founded in the reign of Henry II.: a noble gate-way
of that period, half shrouded in ivy, still remains, but nothing more
except fragments of the cloisters embedded in the main building, which
is partly Elizabethan, but chiefly in Queen Anne's style. Uninteresting
and tasteless as the latter is, it produces more effect by its solid
mass and unbroken facade than Tudor gables or castellated towers. Within
are great lofty square rooms, a fine hall and staircase,--all on a scale
which with us would be seen only in a public building,--and a whole
series of family portraits, priests, knights, courtiers, and dames, by
all the famous painters from Henry VIII.'s time to Queen Victoria's.
[Illustration: CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE NORTHWEST]
The gardens of this place are beautiful, but most artificial-looking,
the shorn grass and geometrical flower-beds producing the effect of a
worsted pattern; stone steps, balustrades, fountains, statues, urns,
vases, and clipped hedges and shrubbery giving them a formal and stately
air in keeping with the house itself: not a blade of grass, not a leaf,
not a pebble, is out of place. From these one passes into the park,
where for miles the undulations of the land form a succession of lovely
knolls and dells shaded by magnificent oaks, imperial trees, and groves
of lindens and chestnuts hardly less grand, while underfoot all is
fern and soft turf. Herds of dappled deer browse beneath these lordly
trees or come down to drink at the Avon, a slow little stream which
winds through the sylvan glades. Since then I have seen a number of
great places, some of them finer than this, but with its legends and
associations it is not a bad type of them all. It was the first I saw,
and will always be first in my recollection.
Besides the beauty of that region, it is full of interest. There are
the romantic ruins of Kenilworth; there are Warwick Castle (partly
burnt) and Warwick town, with Leicester's Hospital, and St. Mary's
Church, and the Beauchamp Chapel, one of the gems of ecclesiology,
with stained-glass windows five hundred years old, and splendid tombs
with effigies in brass and alabaster. There is Coventry with all its
traditions, from the Lady Godiva to Mary Queen of Scots. The procession
of the Lady Godiva still takes place every few years. Last summer there
was a celebration: the lady engaged to perform the part of "the woman
of a thousand summers old" was not forthcoming in time, and some other
eligible female was caught up, clapped on horseback and sent forth: at
the same moment the first one arrived, and the consequence was a
lawsuit.
Stratford-on-Avon, too, belongs to this part of the country,--a little
old-world town, where the bust of Shakespeare looks down upon you from
every coign of vantage. Mysterious being! who sprang from impenetrable
obscurity in that quiet village to light the beacon of an immortal fame,
and sink back into the uncertain shades of his native place until he
rests definitely in the beautiful parish church, so still among its
trees, with the Avon laving the wall of the church-yard.
Anne Hathaway's cottage remains in good preservation, a picturesque
object among the fields; Lucys still live at Charlecote; but too many
people have written of these things,--nobody better than Geoffrey
Crayon, whose sketch I read over as we waited for luncheon at the
Red Horse Inn in the little room called Washington Irving's parlor.
Something ought to be said about that luncheon, which, when good, is the
best of English meals, dinner as a rule being too heavy and monotonous.
On a table-cloth of the traditional whiteness of all napery which is
written about, were set out a lordly cold round of beef, a jug of
home-brewed ale, a substantial loaf of home-made bread, a smaller one
of simple cake, a currant-pie, a rich country cheese, and a pitcher of
thick cream. There were three of us: we ate as much as we liked, and
paid seven shillings, less than two dollars, but I do not give either
the bill of fare or the bill of costs as a sample of ordinary luck.
We saw nothing in England proper prettier than the shady lanes and green
foot-paths of Warwickshire. The view from Harrow Hill and the country
around Malvern are greatly admired, but they are exceedingly tame,
merely an extent of rather flat land seen from an insignificant height,
without water, too patchy to have breadth, which is the strong point of
flat scenery; there are no stretches of field or forest-land; it is all
broken up like a checkerboard by hedgerows and high-roads. We thought
the Fen country roads more striking: it has been reclaimed, and is now
a fine agricultural district. The eye ranges over wide expanses of
cultivation: great plains of pale green bean-vines and yellow grain,
alternating with the rich brown of the peat soil, whose pungent odor
fills the air, stretch away to the horizon, unbroken save by now and
then a row of Lombardy poplars or a line of low willows; the ditches
by which the land is drained and divided are marked by long lines of
brighter green, and full of graceful waving marsh-grass; and at long
intervals a broad, straight, shining path of water takes its way to the
sea. Here and there a solitary windmill reminds one of Holland, but it
is altogether finer than Holland. With all the teeming fertility there
is something which recalls the original desolation: it is very sparsely
settled; one seldom sees a house, and then it is not clustered about
with outbuildings, but stands up alone against the horizon, and makes
one think of Mariana's moated grange. In the midst of these flats rises
the majestic tower of Ely, seen for many a mile.
We passed from this into a wild waste in Norfolk, whose sandy hillocks
were clad in purple heath and green fern, with an occasional pine wood,
dark and mysterious-looking, for in England even the pine is not the
scrubby, scraggy tree of our barrens. This country has a picturesque,
original character of its own, and is somewhat thinly settled too, but
among the heaths and pines we saw more beautiful ruined churches than
in any district south of the Tweed. The unfailing ivy is there, but it
does not grow with over-luxuriance, as it does elsewhere in England,
making a lovely covering for an ugly building or an unsightly stump, but
sometimes muffling and hiding the beauties of finer architecture, and
disguising delicate Gothic outlines like a thick hood.
[Our traveller follows this description of scenery with an
account of what she saw in the great cathedrals of England,
including Westminster, Winchester, Worcester, and Gloucester.
Her description of these is too extended for our space.]
Besides these, we saw Chester, Peterboro', York Minster, Wells, Ely,
Canterbury: for the first three I cared less than for the others, though
Peterboro' is very fine, especially the west front, which is a miracle
of richness and proportion; and York is grand from its size and the
harmony which reigns throughout, all the additions and restorations
having been made in such perfect accordance with the original design
that it looks as if it were the work of the same century. Besides the
fine monuments, there are superb stained-glass windows, one very old,
and called the "Five Sisters," said to have been the gift of five maiden
ladies, each of whom bestowed a compartment designed from her own
embroidery; for which _vide_ "Nicholas Nickleby." We went down into the
crypt to see the remains of the old Norman church and some fragments of
a Saxon one, most ancient of all: there, among those venerable, those
sacred stones, was a steam-engine, contrived to blow the huge bellows of
the organ; and there were the gas-pipes by which the cathedral is now
lighted: a number of jets were flaring in the vaults; the steam-engine
blew and heaved in a horrible manner; there were heaps of coal lying
between the grand broken Norman pillars; the light and smell of gas
pervaded the whole place. It was like the cellar of a manufactory, and
we went up-stairs with outraged sensibilities. Ely is glorious within
and without; Wells is the loveliest of cathedrals; Canterbury is
Canterbury.
Besides cathedrals, almost every parish in England has at least one
beautiful church. The most interesting of them to us was the Holy
Sepulchre at Cambridge. It belonged to the Knights Templars, and is
circular, like most of their churches, in imitation of our Saviour's
tomb at Jerusalem. It is very small, very low, very massive, with
short round pillars, round arches, decorated only with the simple,
effective zigzag moulding peculiar to the early Norman style; corbels
running down from the domical vaulted roof (still recalling Moslem
architecture), and ending in strange faces, military yet melancholy in
expression,--probably portraits of the knights by whom it was founded
in the year of our Lord 1101. The Temple Church in London is much larger
and handsomer, but not nearly so curious and striking.
Almost all the old churches in England suffer exceedingly either from
the defect of the stone of which they are built or the action of the
atmosphere upon it: they look honeycombed, worm-eaten; their tracery
is obliterated, their mullions are wasted as if by wear and tear.
The interiors, protected from the weather, fare best, but even the
cloisters, which are open on one side, are often in a ruinous condition,
and the stone peels and crumbles under the touch like rusty iron.
Chester Cathedral is an extreme instance: its dilapidation amounts to
disfigurement. It is one of the least imposing and interesting, yet for
an American just landed it is a profound revelation; and as Chester is
close to Liverpool, one cannot do better than stop there for a day.
The old city is full of quaint characteristics, too well known to need
description here. One of the gates is called by the odd title of the
Pepper-gate. In the sixteenth century there was a mayor named Pepper,
who had a young daughter in her middle teens. One evening, as she was
playing ball with her companions near this gate, an impetuous youth
rushed in, snatched her up, and carried her off through it. The mayor
caused the gate to be closed, which gave rise to the saying, "When the
daughter is stolen shut the Pepper-gate." Chester is the only city in
England which has preserved the entire circuit of its walls: the town
has spread far beyond them in every direction, except where they are
washed by the Dee, but they form an unbroken round, and are used as a
public walk, from which one looks into many a queer corner. Following
its course, one comes upon a small turret rising from the battlements,
on which is the inscription, "From this tower, on September 27, 1645,
King Charles saw his army defeated at Rowton Moor." How much of anguish
and doom lies in those few words! No doubt Sir Walter Scott is much to
blame, but he can hardly be held answerable for all the sentiment with
which we trace the footsteps of the Stuarts, dogged by fanatical hatred
and murderous revenge, upheld by adventurous, daring, romantic loyalty
and chivalrous self-devotion.
THE "OLD TOWN" OF EDINBURGH.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
[From one of the most notable of Scotland's literary sons we
extract the following attractive description of the famous
capital city of that land, the source of our selection being
Stevenson's "Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes." The "Old Town"
section of the city is particularly limned for us in the
selection here given.]
The ancient and famous metropolis of the North sits overlooking a windy
estuary from the slope and summit of three hills. No situation could be
more commanding for the head city of a kingdom, none better chosen for
noble prospects. From her tall precipice and terraced gardens she looks
far and wide on the sea and broad champaigns. To the east you may catch
at sunset the spark of the May light-house, where the Firth expands into
the German Ocean; and away to the west, over all the carse of Stirling,
you can see the first snows upon Ben Ledi.
But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest
climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds
that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out
of the east, and powdered with snow as it comes flying southward from
the Highland hills. The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty
and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory in the
spring. The delicate die early, and I, as a survivor, among bleak winds
and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their fate.
For all who love shelter and the blessings of the sun, who hate dark
weather and perpetual tilting against squalls, there could scarcely be
found a more unhomely and harassing place of residence. Many such aspire
angrily after that Somewhere-else of the imagination, where all troubles
are supposed to end. They lean over the great bridge which joins the New
Town with the Old--that windiest spot or high altar in this northern
temple of the winds--and watch the trains smoking out from under them
and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to brighter skies. Happy the
passengers who shake off the dust of Edinburgh, and have heard for the
last time the cry of the east wind among her chimney-tops! And yet the
place establishes an interest in people's hearts; go where they will,
they find no city of the same distinction; go where they will, they take
a pride in their old home.
Venice, it has been said, differs from all other cities in the sentiment
which she inspires. The rest may have admirers; she only, a famous fair
one, counts lovers in her train. And, indeed, even by her kindest
friends, Edinburgh is not considered in a similar sense. These like her
for many reasons, not any one of which is satisfactory in itself. They
like her whimsically, if you will, and somewhat as a virtuoso dotes upon
his cabinet. Her attraction is romantic in the narrowest meaning of the
term. Beautiful as she is, she is not so much beautiful as interesting.
She is pre-eminently Gothic, and all the more so since she has set
herself off with some Greek airs, and erected classic temples on her
crags.
In a word, and above all, she is a curiosity. The Palace of Holyrood has
been left aside in the growth of Edinburgh, and stands gray and silent
in a workmen's quarter and among breweries and gas-works. It is a house
of many memories. Great people of yore, kings and queens, buffoons and
grave ambassadors, played their stately farce for centuries in Holyrood.
Wars have been plotted, dancing has lasted deep into the night, murder
has been done, in its chambers. There Prince Charlie held his phantom
levees, and in a very gallant manner represented a fallen dynasty for
some hours. Now, all these things of clay are mingled with the dust; the
king's crown itself is shown for sixpence to the vulgar; but the stone
palace has outlived these changes.
For fifty weeks together it is no more than a show for tourists and a
museum of old furniture; but on the fifty-first, behold the palace
reawakening and mimicking its past. The Lord Commissioner, a kind of
stage sovereign, sits among stage courtiers; a coach and six and
clattering escort come and go before the gate; at night the windows are
lighted up, and its near neighbors, the workmen, may dance in their own
houses to the palace music. And in this the palace is typical. There is
a spark among the embers; from time to time the old volcano smokes.
Edinburgh has but partly abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her
metropolitan trappings. Half a capital and half a country town, the
whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and
flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive
and half a monumental marble. There are armed men and cannon in the
citadel overhead; you may see the troops marshalled on the high parade;
and at night, after the early winter even-fall, and in the morning,
before the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over Edinburgh
the sound of drums and bugles. Grave judges sit bewigged in what was
once the scene of imperial deliberations.
[Illustration: PRINCES STREET AND SIR WALTER SCOTT'S MONUMENT,
EDINBURGH]