Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Emily Ratliff
and PG Distributed Proofreaders
SEEING EUROPE WITH FAMOUS AUTHORS
Selected And Edited With Introduction, Etc.
By Francis W. Halsey
_Editor of "Great Epochs in American History" Associate Editor of "The
World's Famous Orations" and of "The Best of the World's
Classics," etc._
In Ten Volumes
Illustrated
Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland
Part Two
[_Printed in the United States of America_]
II
CONTENTS OF VOLUME II
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND--PART TWO
IV-ENGLISH LITERARY SHRINES--
(_Continued_)
STOKE POGIS--By Charles T. Congdon
HAWORTH--By Theodore F. Wolfe
GAD'S HILL--By Theodore F. Wolfe
RYDAL MOUNT--By William Howitt
TWICKENHAM--By William Howitt
V-OTHER ENGLISH SCENES
STONEHENGE--By Ralph Waldo Emerson
MAGNA CHARTA ISLAND--By Mrs. S. C. Hall
THE HOME OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS--By James M. Hoppin
OXFORD--By Goldwin Smith
CAMBRIDGE--By James M. Hoppin
CHESTER--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE--By Frederick A. Talbot
THE CAPITAL OF THE BRITISH, SAXON AND NORMAN KINGS--By William Howitt
VI--SCOTLAND
EDINBURGH--By Robert Louis Stevenson
HOLYROOD--By David Masson
LINLITHGOW--By Sir Walter Scott
STIRLING--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
ABBOTSFORD--By William Howitt
DRYBURGH ABBEY--By William Howitt
MELROSE ABBEY--By William Howitt
CARLYLE'S BIBTHPLACE AND EARLY HOMES--By John Burroughs
BURNS'S LAND--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
HIGHLAND MARY'S HOME AND GRAVE--By Theodore F. Wolfe
THROUGH THE CALEDONIA CANAL TO INVERNESS--By H. A. Taine
THE SCOTCH HIGHLANDS--By H. A. Taine
BEN LOMOND AND THE HIGHLAND LAKES--By Bayard Taylor
TO THE HEBRIDES--By James Boswell
STAFFA AND IONA--By William Howitt
VII--IRELAND
A SUMMER DAY IN DUBLIN--By William Makepeace Thackeray
DUBLIN CASTLE--By Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall
ST. PATRICK'S CATHEDHAL--By Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall
LIMERICK--By Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall
FROM BELFAST TO DUBLIN--By William Cullen Bryant
THE GIANT'S CAUSEWAY--By Bayard Taylor
CORK--by William Makepeace Thackeray
BLARNEY CASTLE--By Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall
MUCROSS ABBEY--By Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall
FROM GLENGARIFF TO KILLARNEY--By William Makepeace Thackeray
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME II
FRONTISPIECE
PRINCESS STREET AND SCOTT'S MONUMENT, EDINBURGH
STRATFORD-ON-AVON
INTERIOR OF TRINITY CHURCH, STRATFORD
ANNE HATHAWAY'S COTTAGE, NEAR STRATFORD
ROOM IN STRATFORD IN WHICH SHAKESPEARE WAS BORN
NEWSTEAD ABBEY, BYRON'S ANCESTRAL HOME
STOKE POGIS, THE SCENE OF GRAY'S "ELEGY"
OXFORD
EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE
ST. MARTIN'S CHURCH, CANTERBURY
EDINBURGH CASTLE AND NATIONAL GALLERY
OLD GREYFRIAR'S CHURCH, EDINBURGH
HOLYROOD PALACE, EDINBURGH
STIRLING CASTLE
RUINS OF HOLYROOD ABBEY, EDINBURGH
MELROSE ABBEY
GLASTONBURY ABBEY
CRAIGMILLAR CASTLE, SCOTLAND
DUMBARTON ROCK AND CASTLE
LIMERICK CASTLE
ST. PATRICK'S CATHEDRAL, DUBLIN
THE GIANT'S CAUSEWAY
BLARNEY CASTLE
MUCROSS ABBEY
THE LAKES OF KILLARNEY
SACKVILLE STREET, DUBLIN
THE GAP OF DUNLOE
IV
ENGLISH LITERARY SHRINES
(_Continued_)
STOKE POGIS [Footnote: From "Reminiscences of a Journalist." By special
arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton,
Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1884. Mr. Congdon was, for many years, under
Horace Greeley, a leading editorial writer for the New York "Tribune."]
BY CHARLES T. CONGDON
It was a comfort as I came out of the Albert Memorial Chapel, and
rejoined nature upon the Terrace, to mutter to myself those fine lines
which not a hundred years ago everybody knew by heart: "The boast of
heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth ere
gave, Await alike th' inevitable hour. The paths of glory lead but to
the grave,"--a verse which I found it not bad to remember as in the
Chapel Royal I gazed upon the helmets, and banners, and insignia of many
a defunct Knight of the Garter. I wondered if posterity would care much
for George the Fourth, or Third, or Second, or First, whose portraits I
had just been gazing at; I was sure that a good many would remember the
recluse scholar of Pembroke Hall, the Cambridge Professor of Modern
History, who cared for nothing but ancient history; who projected twenty
great poems, and finished only one or two; who spent his life in
commenting upon Plato and studying botany, and in writing letters to his
friend Mason; and who with a real touch of Pindar in his nature, was
content to fiddle-faddle away his life. He died at last of a most
unpoetical gout in the stomach, leaving behind him a cartload of
memoranda, and fifty fragments of fine things; and yet I, a stranger
from a far distant shore, was about to make a little pilgrimage to his
tomb, and all for the sake of that "Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard," which has so held its own while a hundred bulkier things
have been forgotten.
The church itself is an interesting but not remarkable edifice, old,
small, and solidly built in a style common enough in England. Nothing,
however, could be more in keeping with the associations of the scene.
The very humility of the edifice has a property of its own, for anything
more magnificent would jar upon the feelings, as the monument in the
Park does most decidedly. It was Gray's wish that he might be buried
here, near the mother whom he loved so well; otherwise he could hardly
have escaped the posthumous misfortune of a tomb in Westminster Abbey or
St. Paul's. In such case the world would have missed one of the most
charming of associations, and the great poem the most poetical of its
features. For surely it was fit that he who sang so touchingly of the
dead here sleeping, should find near them his last resting-place; that
when the pleasant toil in libraries was over, the last folio closed by
those industrious hands, the last manuscript collated, and the last
flower picked for the herbarium, he who here so tenderly sang of the
emptiness of earthly honors and the nothingness of worldly success should
be buried humbly near those whom he best loved, and where all the moral
of his teaching might be perpetually illustrated. I wondered, as I stood
there, whether Horace Walpole ever thought it worth his while, for the
sake of that early friendship which was so rudely broken, to come there,
away from the haunts of fashion, or from his plaything villa at
Strawberry Hill, to muse for a moment over the grave of one who rated
pedigrees and peerages at their just value. Probably my Lord Orford was
never guilty of such a piece of sentimentality. He was thinking too much
of his pictures and coins and eternal bric-a-brac for that.
A stone set in the outside of the church indicates the spot near which
the poet is buried. I was very anxious to see the interior of the
edifice, and, fortunately I found the sexton busy in the neighborhood.
There was nothing, however, remarkable to be seen, after sixpence had
opened the door, except perhaps the very largest pew which these eyes
ever beheld. It belonged to the Penn family, descendants of drab-coated
and sweet-voiced William Penn, whose seat is in the neighborhood. I do
not know what that primitive Quaker would have said to such an enormous
reservation of space in the house of God for the sole use and behoof of
two or three aristocratic worshipers. Probably few of my readers have
ever seen such a pew as that. It was not so much a pew as a room. It was
literally walled off, and quite set apart from the plebeian portion of
the sanctuary, was carpeted, and finished with comfortable arm-chairs,
and in the middle of it was a stove. The occupants could look out and
over at the altar, but the rustics could not look in and at them. The
Squire might have smoked or read novels, or my lady might have worked
worsted or petted her poodle through the service, without much scandal.
The pew monopolized so much room that there was little left for the
remainder of the "miserable offenders," but I suspect that there was
quite enough for all who came to pray. For it was, as I have said,
literally a country church; and those who sleep near it were peasants.
It is difficult to comprehend the whole physiognomy of the poem, if I
may use the expression, without seeing the spot which it commemorates. I
take it for granted that the reader is familiar with it. There are
"those rugged elms," and there is "that yew tree's shade." There are
"the frail memorials," "with uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture
decked;" there "the name, the years, spelt by the unlettered muse;" and
the holy texts strewn round "that teach the rustic moralist to die."
There is still "the ivy-mantled tower," tho the "moping owl" that
evening did not "to the moon complain," partly because there was no moon
to complain to, and possibly because there was no moping owl in the
tower. But there was one little circumstance which I may be pardoned for
mentioning. Gray, somehow, has the reputation of being an artificial
poet, yet for one who wrote so little poetry he makes a good many
allusions to childhood and children. As I passed through the Park on my
way to the churchyard, I encountered a group of merry boys and girls
playing about the base of the monument; and I recalled that verse which
Gray wrote for the Elegy, and afterward discarded, under the impression
that it made the parenthesis too long.
There scatter'd 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.
I have often wondered how Gray could bear to give up these sweet, tender
and most natural lines. I have sometimes surmised that he thought them a
little too much like Ambrose Philips's verses about children--Namby
Pamby Philips, as the Pope set nicknamed that unfortunate writer.
I lingered about the churchyard until that long twilight, of which we
know nothing in America, began to grow dimmer and dimmer. If it was
still before, it seemed all the stiller now. I was glad that I had
waited so long, because by doing so I understood all the better how true
the Elegy is to nature. The neighborhood, with its agreeable variety of
meadow and wood, has all the hundred charms of the gentle and winning
English scenery. The hush, hardly broken even by the songs of the birds,
brought forcibly to my mind that beautiful line of the Elegy: "And all
the air a solemn stillness holds;" while that other line: "Now fades the
glimmering landscape on the sight," is exactly true. The landscape did
glimmer, and as I watched the sun go down, I pleased myself with the
fancy that I was sitting just where the poet sat, as he revolved those
lines which the world has got by heart. Just then came the cry of the
cattle, and I knew why Gray wrote: "The lowing herd winds slowly o'er
the lea," nor did I fail to encounter a plowman homeward plodding his
weary way.
As I strolled listlessly back to the station, there was such a serenity
on the earth about me, and in the sky above me, that I could easily give
myself to gentle memories and poetic dreams. I recalled the springtime
of life, when I learned this famous Elegy by heart as a pleasant task,
and, as yet unsophisticated by critical notions, accepted it as perfect.
I thought of innumerable things which I had read about it; of the long
and patient revision which its author gave it, year after year, keeping
it in his desk, and then sending it, a mere pamphlet, with no flourish
of trumpets, into the world. Many an ancient figure came to lend
animation to the scene. Horace Walpole in his lace coat and spruce wig
went mincing by; the mother of Gray, with her sister, measured lace for
the customers who came to her little shop in London; the wags of
Pembroke College, graceless varlets, raise an alarm of fire that they
may see the frightened poet drop from the window, half dead with alarm;
old Foulis, the Glasgow printer, volunteers to send from his press such,
a luxurious edition of Gray's poems as the London printers can not
match; Dr. Johnson, holding the page to his eyes, growls over this
stanza, and half-grudgingly praises that. I had spent perhaps the
pleasantest day which the fates vouchsafed me during my sojourn in
England; and here I was back again in Slough Station, ready to return to
the noisy haunts of men. The train came rattling up, and the day with
Gray was over.
HAWORTH [Footnote: From "A Literary Pilgrimage." By arrangement with,
and by permission of, the publishers, J. B. Lippincott Co.
Copyright, 1895.]
BY THEODORE F. WOLFE
Other Brontë shrines have engaged us,--Guiseley, where Patrick Brontë
was married and Neilson worked as a mill-girl; the lowly Thornton home,
where Charlotte was born; the cottage where she visited Harriet
Martineau; the school where she found Caroline Helstone and Rose and
Jessy Yorke; the Fieldhead, Lowood, and Thornfield of her tales; the
Villette where she knew her hero; but it is the bleak Haworth hilltop
where the Brontës wrote the wonderful books and lived the pathetic lives
that most attracts and longest holds our steps. Our way is along
Airedale, now a highway of toil and trade, desolated by the need of
hungry poverty and greed of hungrier wealth; meads are replaced by
blocks of grimy huts, groves are supplanted by factory chimneys that
assoil earth and heaven, the one "shining" stream is filthy with the
refuse of many mills.
At Keighley our walk begins, and altho we have no peas in our "Pilgrim
shoon," the way is heavy with memories of the sad sisters Brontë who so
often trod the dreary miles which bring us to Haworth. The village
street, steep as a roof, has a pavement of rude stones, upon which the
wooden shoes of the villagers clank with an unfamiliar sound. The dingy
houses of gray stone, barren and ugly in architecture, are huddled along
the incline and encroach upon the narrow street. The place and its
situation are a proverb of ugliness in all the countryside; one dweller
in Airedale told us that late in the evening of the last day of creation
it was found that a little rubbish was left, and out of that Haworth was
made. But, grim and rough as it is, the genius of a little woman has
made the place illustrious and draws to it visitors from every quarter
of the world. We are come in the "glory season" of the moors, and as we
climb through the village we behold above and beyond it vast undulating
sweeps of amethyst-tinted hills rising circle beyond circle,--all now
one great expanse of purple bloom stirred by zephyrs which waft to us
the perfume of the heather.
At the hilltop we come to the Black Bull Inn, where one Brontë drowned
his genius in drink, and from our apartment here we look upon all the
shrines we seek. The inn stands at the churchyard gates, and is one of
the landmarks of the place. Long ago preacher Grimshaw flogged the
loungers from its taproom into chapel; here Wesley and Whitefield lodged
when holding meetings on the hilltop; here Brontë's predecessor took
refuge from his riotous parishioners, finally escaping through the low
easement at the back,--out of which poor Branwell Brontë used to vault
when his sisters asked for him at the door. This inn is a quaint
structure, low-eaved and cosy; its furniture is dark with age. We sleep
in a bed once occupied by Henry J. Raymond, [Footnote: In the editorial
sense, the founder of the New York "Times." Mr. Raymond died in 1869,
eighteen years after the paper was started.] and so lofty that steps are
provided to ascend its heights. Our meals are served in the
old-fashioned parlor to which Branwell came. In a nook between the
fireplace and the before-mentioned easement stood the tall arm-chair,
with square seat and quaintly carved back, which was reserved for him.
The landlady denied that he was summoned to entertain travelers here;
"he never needed to be sent for, he came fast enough of himself." His
wit and conviviality were usually the life of the circle, but at times
he was mute and abstracted and for hours together "would just sit and
sit in his corner there." She described him as a "little, red-haired,
light-complexioned chap, cleverer than all his sisters put together.
What they put in their books they got from him," quoth she, reminding us
of the statement in Grundy's Reminiscences that Branwell declared he
invented the plot and wrote the major part of "Wuthering Heights."
Certain it is he possest transcending genius and that in this room that
genius was slain. Here he received the message of renunciation from his
depraved mistress which finally wrecked his life; the landlady, entering
after the messenger had gone, found him in a fit on the floor. Emily
Brontë's rescue of her dog, an incident recorded in "Shirley," occurred
at the inn door.
The graveyard is so thickly sown with blackened tombstones that there is
scant space for blade or foliage to relieve its dreariness, and the
villagers, for whom the yard is a thoroughfare, step from tomb to tomb;
in the time of the Brontës the village women dried their linen on these
graves. Close to the wall which divides the churchyard from the vicarage
is a plain stone set by Charlotte Brontë to mark the grave of Tabby, the
faithful servant who served the Brontës from their childhood till all
but Charlotte were dead. The very ancient church-tower still "rises dark
from the stony enclosure of its yard;" the church itself has been
remodeled and much of its romantic interest destroyed. No interments
have been made in the vaults beneath the aisles since Mr. Brontë was
laid there. The site of the Brontë pew is by the chancel; here Emily sat
in the farther corner, Anne next and Charlotte by the door, within a
foot of the spot where her ashes now lie.
A former sacristan remembered to have seen Thackeray and Miss Martineau
sitting with Charlotte in the pew. And here, almost directly above her
sepulcher, she stood one summer morning and gave herself in marriage to
the man who served for her as "faithfully and long as did Jacob for
Rachel." The Brontë tablet in the wall bears a uniquely pathetic record,
its twelve lines registering eight deaths, of which Mr. Brontë's at the
age of eighty-five, is the last. On a side aisle is a beautiful stained
window inscribed "To the Glory of God, in Memory of Charlotte Brontë, by
an American citizen." The list shows that most of the visitors come from
America, and it was left for a dweller in that far land to set up here
almost the only voluntary memento of England's great novelist. A worn
page of the register displays the tremulous autograph of Charlotte as
she signs her maiden name for the last time, and the signatures of the
witnesses to her marriage,--Miss Wooler, of "Roe Head," Ellen Nussy, who
is the E of Charlotte's letters and the Caroline of "Shirley."
The vicarage and its garden are out of a corner of the churchyard and
separated from it by a low wall. A lane lies along one side of the
churchyard and leads from the street to the vicarage gates. The garden,
which was Emily's care, where she tended stunted shrubs and borders of
unresponsive flowers and where Charlotte planted the currant-bushes, is
beautiful with foliage and flowers, and its boundary wall is overtopped
by a screen of trees which shuts out the depressing prospect of the
graves from the vicarage windows and makes the place seem less "a
churchyard home" than when the Brontës inhabited it. The dwelling is of
gray stone, two stories high, of plain and somber aspect. A wing is
added, the little window-panes are replaced by larger squares, the stone
floors are removed or concealed, curtains--forbidden by Mr. Brontë's
dread of fire--shade the window, and the once bare interior is furbished
and furnished in modern style; but the arrangement of the apartments is
unchanged.
Most interesting of these is the Brontë parlor, at the left of the
entrance; here the three curates of "Shirley" used to take tea with Mr.
Brontë and were upbraided by Charlotte for their intolerance; here the
sisters discuss their plots and read each other's MSS.; here they
transmuted the sorrows of their lives into the stories which make the
name of Brontë immortal; here Emily, "her imagination occupied with
Wuthering Heights," watched in the darkness to admit Branwell coming
late and drunken from the Black Bull; here Charlotte, the survivor of
all, paced the night-watches in solitary anguish, haunted by the
vanished faces, the voices forever stilled, the echoing footsteps that
came no more. Here, too, she lay in her coffin. The room behind the
parlor was fitted by Charlotte for Nichols's study. On the right was
Brontë's study, and behind it the kitchen, where the sisters read with
their books propt on the table before them while they worked, and where
Emily (prototype of "Shirley"), bitten by a dog at the gate of the lane,
took one of Tabby's glowing irons from the fire and cauterized the
wound, telling no one till danger was past.
Above the parlor is the chamber in which Charlotte and Emily died, the
scene of Nichols's loving ministrations to his suffering wife. Above
Brontë's study was his chamber; the adjoining children's study was later
Branwell's apartment and the theater of the most terrible tragedies of
the stricken family; here that ill-fated youth writhed in the horrors of
mania-a-potu; here Emily rescued him--stricken with drunken stupor--from
his burning couch, as "Jane Eyre" saved Rochester; here he breathed out
his blighted life erect upon his feet, his pockets filled with
love-letters from the perfidious woman who brought his ruin. Even now
the isolated site of the parsonage, its environment of graves and
wild-moors, its exposure to the fierce winds of the long winters, make
it unspeakably dreary; in the Brontës' time it must have been cheerless
indeed. Its influence darkened the lives of the inmates and left its
fateful impression upon the books here produced. Visitors are rarely
admitted to the vicarage; among those against whom its doors have been
closed is the gifted daughter of Charlotte's literary idol, to whom
"Jane Eyre" was dedicated, Thackeray.
By the vicarage lane were the cottage of Tabby's sister, the school the
Brontës daily visited, and the sexton's dwelling where the curates
lodged. Behind the vicarage a savage expanse of gorse and heather rises
to the horizon and stretches many miles away; a path oft-trodden by the
Brontës leads between low walls from their home to this open moor, their
habitual resort in childhood and womanhood. The higher plateaus afford a
wide prospect, but, despite the August bloom and fragrance and the
delightful play of light and shadow along the sinuous sweeps, the aspect
of the bleak, treeless, houseless waste of uplands is even now
dispiriting; when frosts have destroyed its verdure, and wintry skies
frown above, its gloom and desolation must be terrible beyond
description. Remembering that the sisters found even these usually
dismal moors a welcome relief from their tomb of a dwelling, we may
appreciate the utter dreariness of their situation and the pathos of
Charlotte's declaration, "I always dislike to leave Haworth, it takes so
long to be content again after I return."
GAD'S HILL [Footnote: From "A Literary Pilgrimage." By arrangement with,
and by permission of, the publishers, J. B. Lippincott Co.
Copyright, 1895.]
BY THEODORE F. WOLFE
"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' 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 ambition of his life. In one of his travelers' 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.
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 bookbacks; 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 always. 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'
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 imperiled his life. From this window we look out upon a lawn
decked with shrubbery and see across undulating cornfields his beloved
Cobham. From the parqueted 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 these 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 nearby Rochester, which little David Copperfield crossed
"footsore 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' 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 up-rear their
venerable forms and many somber 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--"A
Tale of Two Cities," "The Uncommercial Traveler," "Our Mutual Friend,"
"The Mystery of 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.
RYDAL MOUNT [Footnote: From "Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent
British Poets."]
BY WILLIAM HOWITT
As you advance a mile or more on the road from Ambleside toward
Grasmere, a lane overhung with trees turns up to the right, and there,
at some few hundred yards from the highway, stands the modest cottage of
the poet, elevated on Rydal Mount, so as to look out over the
surrounding sea of foliage, and to take in a glorious view. Before it,
at some distance across the valley, stretches a high screen of bold and
picturesque mountains; behind, it is overtowered by a precipitous hill,
called Nab-scar; but to the left, you look down over the broad waters of
Windermere, and to the right over the still and more embosomed flood
of Grasmere.
Whichever way the poet pleases to advance from his house, it must be
into scenery of that beauty of mountain, stream, wood, and lake, which
has made Cumberland so famous over all England. He may steal away up
backward from his gate and ascend into the solitary hills, or diverging
into the grounds of Lady Mary Fleming, his near neighbor, may traverse
the deep shades of the woodland, wander along the banks of the rocky
rivulet, and finally stand before the well known waterfall there. If he
descend into the highway, objects of beauty still present themselves.
Cottages and quiet houses here and there glance from their little spots
of Paradise, through the richest boughs of trees; Windermere, with its
wide expanse of waters, its fairy islands, its noble hills, allures his
steps in one direction; while the sweet little lake of Rydal, with its
heronry and its fine background of rocks, invites him in another.
In this direction the vale of Grasmere, the scene of his early married
life, opens before him, and Dunmail-raise and Langdale-pikes lift their
naked corky summits, as hailing him to the pleasures of old
companionship. Into no quarter of this region of lakes, and mountains,
and vales of primitive life, can he penetrate without coming upon ground
celebrated by his muse. He is truly "sole king of rocky Cumberland."
The immediate grounds in which his house stands are worthy of the
country and the man. It is, as its name implies, a mount. Before the
house opens a considerable platform, and around and beneath lie various
terraces and descend various walks, winding on amid a profusion of trees
and luxuriant evergreens. Beyond the house, you ascend various terraces,
planted with trees now completely overshadowing them; and these terraces
conduct you to a level above the house-top, and extend your view of the
enchanting scenery on all sides.
Above you tower the rocks and precipitous slopes of Nab-scar; and below
you, embosomed in its trees, lies the richly ornate villa of Mr. William
Ball, a friend, whose family and the poet's are on such social terms,
that a little gate between their premises opens both to each family
alike. This cottage and grounds were formerly the property of Charles
Lloyd, also a friend, and one of the Bristol and Stowey coterie. Both he
and Lovell have been long dead; Lovell, indeed, was drowned, on a voyage
to Ireland, in the very heyday of the dreams of Pantisocracy, in which
he was an eager participant.
The poet's house, itself, is a proper poet's abode. It is at once
modest, plain, yet tasteful and elegant. An ordinary dining-room, a
breakfast-room in the center, and a library beyond, form the chief
apartments. There are a few pictures and busts, especially those of
Scott and himself, a good engraving of Burns, and the like, with a good
collection of books, few of them very modern.
TWICKENHAM [Footnote: From "Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British
Poets."]
BY WILLIAM HOWITT
It seems that Pope did not purchase the freehold of the house and
grounds at Twickenham, but only a long lease. He took his father and
mother along with him. His father died there the year after, but his
mother continued to live till 1733, when she died at the great age of
ninety-three. For twenty years she had the singular satisfaction of
seeing her son the first poet of his age; carest by the greatest men of
the time, courted by princes, and feared by all the base. No parents
ever found a more tender and dutiful son. With him they shared in honor
the ease and distinction he had acquired. They were the cherished
objects of his home. Swift paid him no false compliment when he said, in
condoling with him on his mother's death, "You are the most dutiful son
I have ever known or heard of, which is a felicity not happening to one
in a million."
The property at Twickenham is properly described by Roscoe as lying on
both sides of the highway, rendering it necessary for him to cross the
road to arrive at the higher and more ornamental part of his gardens. In
order to obviate this inconvenience, he had recourse to the expedient of
excavating a passage under the road from one part of his grounds to the
other, a fact to which he alludes in these lines:
"Know all the toil the heavy world can heap,
Rolls o'er my grotto, nor disturbs my sleep."
The lower part of these grounds, in which his house stood, constituted,
in fact, only the sloping bank of the river, by much the smaller portion
of his territory. The passage, therefore, was very necessary to that far
greater part, which was his wilderness, shrubbery, forest, and every
thing, where he chiefly planted and worked. This passage he formed into
a grotto, having a front of rude stonework opposite to the river and
decorated within with spars, ores, and shells. Of this place he has
himself left this description:
"I have put the last hand to my works of this kind, in happily finishing
the subterranean way and grotto. I found there a spring of the clearest
water, which falls in a perpetual rill, that echoes through the cavern
night and day. From the River Thames you see through my arch, up a walk
of the wilderness, to a kind of open temple wholly composed of shells in
the rustic manner; and from that distance under the temple you look down
through a sleeping arcade of trees, and see the sails on the river
passing suddenly and vanishing, as through a perspective glass. When you
shut the door of this grotto, it becomes, on the instant, from a
luminous room, a camera obscura, on the walls of which all the objects
of the river, hills, woods, and boats are forming a moving picture, in
their visible radiations; and when you have a mind to light it less, it
affords you a very different scene. It is finished with shells,
interspersed with looking-glass in regular forms, and in the ceiling is
a star of the same material, at which, when a lamp of an orbicular
figure of thin alabaster is hung in the middle, a thousand pointed rays
glitter, and are reflected over the place. There are connected to this
grotto, by a narrow passage, two porches, one toward the river, of
smooth stones full of light and open; the other toward the garden,
shadowed with trees, rough with shells, flints, and iron ore. The bottom
is paved with simple pebbles, as is also the adjoining walk up the
wilderness to the temple, in the natural state, agreeing not ill with
the little dripping murmur, and the aquatic idea of the whole place. It
wants nothing to complete it but a good statue with an inscription, like
that beautiful antique one which you know I am so fond of. You will
think I have been very poetical in this description; but it is pretty
near the truth."
But it was not merely in forming this grotto that Pope employed himself;
it was in building and extending his house, which was in a Roman style,
with columns, arcades, and porticos. The designs and elevations of these
buildings may be seen by his own hand in the British Museum, drawn in
his usual way on backs of letters. The following passage, in a letter to
Mr. Digby, will be sufficient to give us his idea of both his Thamesward
garden and his house in a summer view: "No ideas you could form in the
winter could make you imagine what Twickenham is in this warm summer.
Our river glitters beneath the unclouded sun, at the same time that its
banks retain the verdure of showers; our gardens are offering their
first nosegays; our trees, like new acquaintance brought happily
together, are stretching their arms to meet each other, and growing
nearer and nearer every hour. The birds are paying their thanksgiving
songs for the new habitations I have made them. My building rises high
enough to attract the eye and curiosity of the passenger from the river,
where, upon beholding a mixture of beauty and ruin, he inquires, 'What
house is falling, or what church is arising?' So little taste have our
common Tritons for Vitruvius; whatever delight the poetical gods of the
river may take in reflecting on their streams, my Tuscan porticos, or
Ionic pilasters."
Pope's architecture, like his poetry, has been the subject of much and
vehement dispute. On the one hand, his grottos and his buildings have
been vituperated as most tasteless and childish; on the other, applauded
as beautiful and romantic. Into neither of these disputes need we enter.
In both poetry and architecture a bolder spirit and a better taste have
prevailed since Pope's time. With all his foibles and defects, Pope was
a great poet of the critical and didactic kind, and his house and place
had their peculiar beauties. He was himself half inclined to suspect the
correctness of his fancy in such matters, and often rallies himself on
his gimcracks and crotchets in both verse and prose....
Pope's building madness, however, had method in it. Unlike the great
romancer and builder of our time, [Footnote: Sir Walter Scott] he never
allowed such things to bring him into debt. He kept his mind at ease by
such prudence, and soothed and animated it under circumstances of
continued evil by working among his trees, and grottos, and vines, and
at his labors of poetry and translations. At the period succeeding the
rebellion of 1715, when that event had implicated and scattered so many
of his highest and most powerful friends, here he was laboring away at
his "Homer" with a progress which astonished every one. Removed at once
from the dissipations and distractions of London, and from the agreeable
interruptions of such society, he found leisure and health enough here
to give him vigor for exertions astonishing for so weak a frame. The
tastes he indulged here, if they were not faultless according to our
notions, were healthy, and they endured. To the end of his life he
preserved his strong attachment to his house and grounds.
V
OTHER ENGLISH SCENES
STONEHENGE [Footnote: From "English Traits." Published by Houghton,
Mifflin Co. Emerson's second visit to England, during which he saw
Stonehenge, was made in 1847. Of all the Druidical remains in Europe,
Stonehenge is perhaps the most remarkable, altho at Carnac in Brittany
on the northern shore of the Bay of Biscay, are Druidical remains more
numerous, but in general they are smaller and less suggestive of
constructive design.]
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON
We left the train at Salisbury, and took a carriage to Amesbury, passing
by Old Sarum, a bare, treeless hill, once containing the town which sent
two members to Parliament--now, not a hut--and, arriving at Amesbury, we
stopt at the George Inn. After dinner we walked to Salisbury Plain. On
the broad downs, under the gray sky, not a house was visible, nothing
but Stonehenge, which looked like a group of brown dwarfs in the wide
expanse--Stonehenge and the barrows, which rose like green bosses about
the plain, and a few hay ricks. On the top of a mountain the old temple
would not be more impressive. Far and wide a few shepherds with their
flocks sprinkled the plain, and a bagman drove along the road. It looked
as if the wide margin given in this crowded isle to this primeval temple
were accorded by the veneration of the British race to the old egg out
of which all their ecclesiastical structures and history had proceeded.
Stonehenge is a circular colonnade with a diameter of a hundred feet,
and enclosing a second and third colonnade within. We walked round the
stones, and clambered over them, to wont ourselves with their strange
aspect and groupings, and found a nook sheltered from the wind among
them, where C. [Footnote: Thomas Carlyle, the author of "Sartor
Resartus," etc., etc.] lighted his cigar. It was pleasant to see that
just this simplest of all simple structures--two upright stones and a
lintel laid across--had long outstood all later churches, and all
history, and were like what is most permanent on the face of the planet:
these, and the barrows--(mere mounds of which there are a hundred and
sixty within a circle of three miles about Stonehenge)--like the same
mound on the plain of Troy, which still makes good to the passing
mariner on Hellespont, the vaunt of Homer and the fame of Achilles.
Within the enclosure grow buttercups, nettles, and, all around, wild
thyme, daisy, meadowsweet, goldenrod, thistle, and the carpeting grass.
Over us, larks were soaring and singing--as my friend said: "the larks
which were hatched last year, and the wind which was hatched many
thousand years ago." We counted and measured by paces the biggest
stones, and soon knew as much as any man can suddenly know of the
inscrutable temple. There are ninety-four stones, and there were once
probably one hundred and sixty. The temple is circular and uncovered,
and the situation fixt astronomically--the grand entrances here, and at
Abury, being placed exactly northeast, "as all the gates of the old
cavern temples are." How came the stones here, for these sarsens or
Druidical sandstones are not found in this neighborhood? The sacrificial
stone, as it is called, is the only one in all these blocks that can
resist the action of fire, and, as I read in the books, must have been
brought one hundred and fifty miles.
On almost every stone we found the marks of the mineralogist's hammer
and chisel. The nineteen smaller stones of the inner circle are of
granite. I, who had just come from Professor Sedgwick's Cambridge Museum
of megatheria and mastodons, was ready to maintain that some cleverer
elephants or mylodonta had borne off and laid these rocks one on
another. Only the good beasts must have known how to cut a well-wrought
tenon and mortise, and to smooth the surface of some of the stones. The
chief mystery is, that any mystery should have been allowed to settle on
so remarkable a monument, in a country on which all the muses have kept
their eyes now for eighteen hundred years. We are not yet too late to
learn much more than is known of this structure. Some diligent Fellowes
or Layard will arrive, stone by stone, at the whole history, by that
exhaustive British sense and perseverance, so whimsical in its choice of
objects, which leaves its own Stonehenge or Choir Gaur to the rabbits,
while it opens pyramids, and uncovers Nineveh. Stonehenge, in virtue of
the simplicity of its plan, and its good preservation, is as if new and
recent; and, a thousand years hence, men will thank this age for the
accurate history it will yet eliminate.
MAGNA CHARTA ISLAND [Footnote: From "Pilgrimages to English Shrines."
Magna Charta Island lies in the Thames, a few miles below Windsor.]
BY MRS. S. C. HALL.
The Company of Basket-makers (if there be such a company) have claimed a
large portion of the field--where the barons, "clad in complete steel,"
assembled to confer with King John upon the great charter of English
freedom, by which, Hume truly but coldly says, "very important
liabilities and privileges were either granted or secured to every order
of men in the kingdom; to the clergy, to the barons, and to the
people"--the Basket-makers, we say, have availed themselves of the low
land of Runnymead to cultivate osiers; piles and stacks of "withies" in
various stages of utility, for several hundred yards shut out the river
from the wayfarer, but as he proceeds they disappear, and Cooper's Hill
on the left, the rich flat of Runnymead, the Thames, and the groves of
time-honored Anckerwycke, on its opposite bank, form together a rich and
most interesting picture.