Between the fair boundaries of the counties of Hereford and Worcester
rise in a long undulation the sloping pastures of the Malvern Hills.
Consulting a big red book on the castles and manors of England, we
found Lockley Park to be seated near the base of this grassy range,
tho in which county I forget. In the pages of this genial volume
Lockley Park and its appurtenances made a very handsome figure. We
took up our abode at a certain little wayside inn, at which in the
days of leisure the coach must have stopt for lunch, and burnished
pewters of rustic ale been tenderly exalted to "outsides" athirst with
breezy progression. Here we stopt, for sheer admiration of its steep
thatched roof, its latticed windows, and its homely porch. We allowed
a couple of days to elapse in vague undirected strolls and sweet
sentimental observance of the land, before we prepared to execute the
especial purpose of our journey. This admirable region is a compendium
of the general physiognomy of England. The noble friendliness of the
scenery, its subtle old friendliness, the magical familiarity of
multitudinous details, appealed to us at every step and at every
glance. Deep in our souls a natural affection answered. The whole
land, in the full, warm rains of the last of April, had burst into
sudden perfect spring. The dark walls of the hedge-rows had turned
into blooming screens; the sodden verdure of lawn and meadow was
streaked with a ranker freshness. We went forth without loss of time
for a long walk on the hills. Reaching their summits, you find half
England unrolled at your feet. A dozen broad counties, within the vast
range of your vision, commingle their green exhalations. Closely
beneath us lay the dark, rich flats of hedgy Worcestershire and the
copse-checkered slopes of rolling Hereford, white with the blossom of
apples. At widely opposite points of the large expanse two great
cathedral towers rise sharply, taking the light, from the settled
shadow of the circling towns--the light, the ineffable English light!
"Out of England," cried Searle, "it's but a garish world!"
[Footnote 66: From "A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales." Copyright,
1875. Houghton, Mifflin Company.]
The whole vast sweep of our surrounding prospect lay answering in a
myriad fleeting shades the cloudy process of the tremendous sky. The
English heaven is a fit antithesis to the complex English earth. We
possess in America the infinite beauty of the blue; England possesses
the splendor of combined and animated clouds. Over against us, from
our station on the hills, we saw them piled and dissolved, compacted
and shifted, blotting the azure with sullen rain-spots, stretching,
breeze-fretted, into dappled fields of gray, bursting into a storm of
light or melting into a drizzle of silver. We made our way along the
rounded summits of these well-grazed heights--mild, breezy inland
downs--and descended through long-drawn slopes of fields, green to
cottage doors, to where a rural village beckoned us from its seat
among the meadows. Close beside it, I admit, the railway shoots
fiercely from its tunnel in the hills; and yet there broods upon this
charming hamlet an old-time quietude and privacy, which seems to make
it a violation of confidence to tell its name so far away. We struck
through a narrow lane, a green lane, dim with its height of hedges; it
led us to a superb old farm-house, now jostled by the multiplied lanes
and roads which have curtailed its ancient appanage. It stands in
stubborn picturesqueness, at the receipt of sad-eyed contemplation and
the sufferance of "sketches." I doubt whether out of Nuremberg--or
Pompeii!--you may find so forcible an image of the domiciliary genius
of the past. It is cruelly complete; its bended beams and joists,
beneath the burden of its gables, seem to ache and groan with memories
and regrets. The short, low windows, where lead and glass combine in
equal proportions to hint to the wondering stranger of the medieval
gloom within, still prefer their darksome office to the grace of
modern day.
Such an old house fills an American with an indefinable feeling of
respect. So propt and patched and tinkered with clumsy tenderness,
clustered so richly about its central English sturdiness, its oaken
vertebrations, so humanized with ages of use and touches of beneficent
affection, it seemed to offer to our grateful eyes a small, rude
synthesis of the great English social order. Passing out upon the
highroad, we came to the common browsing-patch, the "village green" of
the tales of our youth. Nothing was wanting; the shaggy, mouse-colored
donkey, nosing the turf with his mild and huge proboscis, the geese,
the old woman--the old woman, in person, with her red cloak and black
bonnet, frilled about the face and double-frilled beside her decent,
placid cheeks--the towering plowman with his white smock-frock,
puckered on chest and back, his short corduroys, his mighty calves,
his big, red, rural face. We greeted these things as children greet
the loved pictures in a story book, lost and mourned and found again.
It was marvelous how well we knew them. Beside the road we saw a
plow-boy straddle, whistling on a stile. Gainsborough might have
painted him. Beyond the stile, across the level velvet of a meadow, a
footpath lay, like a thread of darker woof. We followed it from field
to field and from stile to stile. It was the way to church. At the
church we finally arrived, lost in its rook-haunted churchyard, hidden
from the work-day world by the broad stillness of pastures--a gray,
gray tower, a huge black yew, a cluster of village graves, with
crooked headstones, in grassy, low relief. The whole scene was deeply
ecclesiastical. My companion was overcome.
"You must bury me here," he cried. "It's the first church I have seen
in my life. How it makes a Sunday where it stands!"
The next day we saw a church of statelier proportions. We walked over
to Worcester, through such a mist of local color that I felt like one
of Smollett's pedestrian heroes, faring tavern-ward for a night of
adventures. As we neared the provincial city we saw the steepled mass
of the cathedral, long and high, rise far into the cloud-freckled
blue. And as we came nearer still, we stopt on the bridge and viewed
the solid minster reflected in the yellow Severn. And going farther
yet we entered the town--where surely Miss Austen's heroines, in
chariots and curricles, must often have come a-shopping for
swan's-down boas and high lace mittens; we lounged about the gentle
close and gazed insatiably at that most soul-soothing sight, the
waning, wasting afternoon light, the visible ether which feels the
voices of the chimes, far aloft on the broad perpendicular field of
the cathedral tower; saw it linger and nestle and abide, as it loves
to do on all bold architectural spaces, converting them graciously
into registers and witnesses of nature; tasted, too, as deeply of the
peculiar stillness of this clerical precinct; saw a rosy English lad
come forth and lock the door of the old foundation school, which
marries its hoary basement to the soaring Gothic of the church, and
carry his big responsible key into one of the quiet canonical houses;
and then stood musing together on the effect on one's mind of having
in one's boyhood haunted such cathedral shades as a King's scholar,
and yet kept ruddy with much cricket in misty meadows by the Severn.
On the third morning we betook ourselves to Lockley Park, having
learned that the greater part of it was open to visitors, and that,
indeed, on application, the house was occasionally shown.
Within its broad enclosure many a declining spur of the great hills
melted into parklike slopes and dells. A long avenue wound and circled
from the outermost gate through an untrimmed woodland, whence you
glanced at further slopes and glades and copses and bosky recesses--at
everything except the limits of the place. It was as free and wild and
untended as the villa of an Italian prince; and I have never seen the
stern English fact of property put on such an air of innocence. The
weather had just become perfect; it was one of the dozen exquisite
days of the English year--days stamped with a refinement of purity
unknown in more liberal climes. It was as if the mellow brightness, as
tender as that of the primroses which starred the dark waysides like
petals wind-scattered over beds of moss, had been meted out to us by
the cubic foot--tempered, refined, recorded!