It was a rainy, misty morning when I left my kind retreat and friends in
Edinburgh. Considerate as every body had been about imposing on my time
or strength, still you may well believe that I was much exhausted.
We left Edinburgh, therefore, with the determination to plunge at once
into some hidden and unknown spot, where we might spend two or three
days quietly by ourselves; and remembering your Sunday at
Stratford-on-Avon, I proposed that we should go there. As Stratford,
however, is off the railroad line we determined to accept the
invitation, which was lying by us, from our friend Joseph Sturge, of
Birmingham, and take sanctuary with him. So we wrote on, intrusting him
with the secret, and charging him on no account to let any one know of
our arrival.
Well in the rail car, we went whirling along by Preston Pans, where was
fought the celebrated battle in which Colonel Gardiner was killed; by
Dunbar, where Cromwell told his army to "trust in God and keep their
powder dry;" through Berwick-on-the-Tweed and Newcastle-on-Tyne; by the
old towers and gates of York, with its splendid cathedral; getting a
view of Durham Cathedral in the distance.
The country between Berwick and Newcastle is one of the greatest
manufacturing districts of England, and for smoke, smut, and gloom,
Pittsburg and Wheeling bear no comparison to it. The English sky,
always paler and cooler in its tints than ours, here seems to be turned
into a leaden canopy; tall chimneys belch forth gloom and confusion;
houses, factories, fences, even trees and grass, look grim and sooty.
It is true that people with immense wealth can live in such regions in
cleanliness and elegance; but how must it be with the poor? I know of no
one circumstance more unfavorable to moral purity than the necessity of
being physically dirty. Our nature is so intensely symbolical, that
where the outward sign of defilement becomes habitual, the inner is too
apt to correspond. I am quite sure that before there can be a universal
millennium, trade must be pursued in such a way as to enable the working
classes to realize something of beauty and purity in the circumstances
of their outward life.
I have heard there is a law before the British Parliament, whose
operation is designed to purify the air of England by introducing
chimneys which shall consume all the sooty particles which now float
about, obscuring the air and carrying defilement with them. May that day
be hastened!
At Newcastle-on-Tyne and some other places various friends came out to
meet us, some of whom presented us with most splendid bouquets of
hothouse flowers. This region has been the seat of some of the most
zealous and efficient antislavery operations in England.
About night our cars whizzed into the depot at Birmingham; but just
before we came in a difficulty was started in the company. "Mr. Sturge
is to be there waiting for us, but he does not know us, and we don't
know him; what is to be done?" C---- insisted that he should know him by
instinct; and so after we reached the depot, we told him to sally out
and try. Sure enough, in a few moments he pitched upon a cheerful,
middle-aged gentleman, with a moderate but not decisive broad brim to
his hat, and challenged him as Mr. Sturge; the result verified the truth
that "instinct is a great matter." In a few moments our new friend and
ourselves were snugly encased in a fly, trotting off as briskly as ever
we could to his place at Edgbaston, nobody a whit the wiser. You do not
know how snug we felt to think we had done it so nicely.
The carriage soon drove in upon a gravel walk, winding among turf,
flowers, and shrubs, where we found opening to us another home as warm
and kindly as the one we had just left, made doubly interesting by the
idea of entire privacy and seclusion.
After retiring to our chambers to repair the ravages of travel, we
united in the pleasant supper room, where the table was laid before a
bright coal fire: no unimportant feature this fire, I can assure you, in
a raw cloudy evening. A glass door from the supper room opened into a
conservatory, brilliant with pink and yellow azalias, golden
calceolarias, and a profusion of other beauties, whose names I did not
know.
The side tables were strewn with books, and the ample folds of the drab
curtains, let down over the windows, shut out the rain, damp, and chill.
When we were gathered round the table, Mr. Sturge said that he had
somewhat expected Elihu Burritt that evening, and we all hoped he would
come. I must not omit to say, that the evening circle was made more
attractive and agreeable in my eyes by the presence of two or three of
the little people, who were blessed with the rosy cheek of English
children.
Mr. Sturge is one of the most prominent and efficient of the
philanthropists of modern days. An air of benignity and easy good
nature veils and conceals in him the most unflinching perseverance and
energy of purpose. He has for many years been a zealous advocate of the
antislavery cause in England, taking up efficiently the work begun by
Clarkson and Wilberforce. He, with a friend of the same denomination,
made a journey at their own expense, to investigate the workings of the
apprentice system, by which the act of immediate emancipation in the
West Indies was for a while delayed. After his return he sustained a
rigorous examination of seven days before a committee of the House of
Commons, the result of which successfully demonstrated the abuses of
that system, and its entire inutility for preparing either masters or
servants for final emancipation. This evidence went as far as any thing
to induce Parliament to declare immediate and entire emancipation.
Mr. Sturge also has been equally zealous and engaged in movements for
the ignorant and perishing classes at home. At his own expense he has
sustained a private Farm School for the reformation of juvenile
offenders, and it has sometimes been found that boys, whom no severity
and no punishment seemed to affect, have been entirely melted and
subdued by the gentler measures here employed. He has also taken a very
ardent and decided part in efforts for the extension of the principles
of peace, being a warm friend and supporter of Elihu Burritt.
The next morning it was agreed that we should take our drive to
Stratford-on-Avon. As yet this shrine of pilgrims stands a little aloof
from the bustle of modern progress, and railroad cars do not run
whistling and whisking with brisk officiousness by the old church and
the fanciful banks of the Avon.
The country that we were to pass over was more peculiarly old English;
that phase of old English which is destined soon to pass away, under the
restless regenerating force of modern progress.
Our ride along was a singular commixture of an upper and under current
of thought. Deep down in our hearts we were going back to English days;
the cumbrous, quaint, queer, old, picturesque times; the dim, haunted
times between cock-crowing and morning; those hours of national
childhood, when popular ideas had the confiding credulity, the poetic
vivacity, and versatile life, which distinguish children from grown
people.
No one can fail to feel, in reading any of the plays of Shakspeare, that
he was born in an age of credulity and marvels, and that the materials
out of which his mind was woven were dyed in the grain, in the haunted
springs of tradition. It would have been as absolutely impossible for
even himself, had he been born in the daylight of this century, to have
built those quaint, Gothic structures of imagination, and tinted them
with their peculiar coloring of marvellousness and mystery, as for a
modern artist to originate and execute the weird designs of an ancient
cathedral. Both Gothic architecture and this perfection of Gothic poetry
were the springing and efflorescence of that age, impossible to grow
again. They were the forest primeval; other trees may spring in their
room, trees as mighty and as fair, but not such trees.
So, as we rode along, our speculations and thoughts in the under current
were back in the old world of tradition. While, on the other hand, for
the upper current, we were keeping up a brisk conversation on the peace
question, on the abolition of slavery, on the possibility of ignoring
slave-grown produce, on Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, and, in fact, on all
the most wide-awake topics of the present day.
One little incident occurred upon the road. As we were passing by a
quaint old mansion, which stood back from the road, surrounded by a deep
court, Mr. S. said to me, "There is a friend here who would like to see
thee, if thou hast no objections," and went on to inform me that she was
an aged woman, who had taken a deep interest in the abolition of slavery
since the time of its first inception under Clarkson and Wilberforce,
though now lying very low on a sick bed. Of course we all expressed our
willingness to stop, and the carriage was soon driving up the gravelled
walk towards the house. We were ushered into a comfortable sitting room,
which looked out on beautiful grounds, where the velvet grass, tall,
dark trees, and a certain quaint air of antiquity in disposition and
arrangement, gave me a singular kind of pleasure; the more so, that it
came to me like a dream; that the house and the people were unknown to
me, and the whole affair entirely unexpected.
I was soon shown into a neat chamber, where an aged woman was lying in
bed. I was very much struck and impressed by her manner of receiving me.
With deep emotion and tears, she spoke of the solemnity and sacredness
of the cause which had for years lain near her heart. There seemed to be
something almost prophetic in the solemn strain of assurance with which
she spoke of the final extinction of slavery throughout the world.
I felt both pleased and sorrowful. I felt sorrowful because I knew, if
all true Christians in America had the same feelings, that men, women,
and children, for whom Christ died, would no more be sold in my country
on the auction block.
There have been those in America who have felt and prayed thus nobly and
sincerely for the heathen in Burmah and Hindostan, and that sentiment
was a beautiful and an ennobling one; but, alas! the number has been few
who have felt and prayed for the heathenism, and shame of our own
country; for the heathenism which sells the very members of the body of
Christ as merchandise.
When we were again on the road, we were talking on the change of times
in England since railroads began; and Mr. S. gave an amusing description
of how the old lords used to travel in state, with their coaches and
horses, when they went up once a year on a solemn pilgrimage to London,
with postilions and outriders, and all the country gaping and wondering
after them.
"I wonder," said one of us, "if Shakspeare were living, what he would
say to our times, and what he would think of all the questions that are
agitating the world now." That he did have thoughts whose roots ran far
beyond the depth of the age in which he lived, is plain enough from
numberless indications in his plays; but whether he would have taken any
practical interest in the world's movements is a fair question. The
poetic mind is not always the progressive one; it has, like moss and
ivy, a need for something old to cling to and germinate upon. The
artistic temperament, too, is soft and sensitive; so there are all these
reasons for thinking that perhaps he would have been for keeping out of
the way of the heat and dust of modern progress. It does not follow
because a man has penetration to see an evil, he has energy to reform
it.
Erasmus saw all that Luther saw just as clearly, but he said that he had
rather never have truth at all, than contend for it with the world in
such a tumult. However, on the other hand, England did, in Milton, have
one poet who girt himself up to the roughest and stormiest work of
reformation; so it is not quite certain, after all, that Shakspeare
might not have been a reformer in our times. One thing is quite certain,
that he would have said very shrewd things about all the matters that
move the world now, as he certainly did about all matters that he was
cognizant of in his own day.
It was a little before noon when we drove into Stratford, by which time,
with our usual fatality in visiting poetic shrines, the day had melted
off into a kind of drizzling mist, strongly suggestive of a downright
rain. It is a common trick these English days have; the weather here
seems to be possessed of a water spirit. This constant drizzle is good
for ivies, and hawthorns, and ladies' complexions, as whoever travels
here will observe, but it certainly is very bad for tourists.
This Stratford is a small town, of between three and four thousand
inhabitants, and has in it a good many quaint old houses, and is
characterized (so I thought) by an air of respectable, stand-still, and
meditative repose, which, I am afraid, will entirely give way before the
railroad demon, for I understand that it is soon to be connected by the
Oxford, Worcester, and Wolverhampton line with all parts of the kingdom.
Just think of that black little screeching imp rushing through these
fields which have inspired so many fancies; how every thing poetical
will fly before it! Think of such sweet snatches as these set to the
tune of a railroad whistle:--
"Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
And Phoebus 'gins to rise,
His steeds to water at those springs
On chaliced flowers that lies.
And winking Mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes,
With everything that pretty bid
My lady sweet to rise."