LONDON.
It is near four o’clock, and in Bond street you might almost walk on the heads of livery-servants—at every stride stepping over the heads of two ladies and a dandy exclusive. Thoroughfare it is none, for the carriages are creeping on, inch by inch, the blood horses “marking time,” the coachman watchful for his panels and whippletrees, and the lady within her silken chariot, lounging back, with her eyes upon the passing line, neither impatient nor surprised at the delay, for she came there on purpose. Between the swaying bodies of the carriages,hesitatingpast, she receives the smiles and recognitions of all her male acquaintances; while occasionally a female ally (for allies against the rest of the sex are as necessary in society to women, as in war to monarchs)—occasionally, I say, a female ally announced by the crest upon the blinker of an advancing horse, arrives opposite her window, and, with only the necessary delay in passing, they exchange, perhaps, inquiries for health, but, certainly, programmes, comprehensive though brief, for the prosecution of each other’s loves or hates. Occasionally a hack cab, seduced into attempting Bond street by some momentary opening, finds itself closed in, forty deep, by chariots, britzas, landaus, and family coaches; and amid the imperturbable and unanswering whips of the hammercloth, with a passenger who is losing the coach by the delay, he must wait, will-he-nill-he, till some “pottering” Dowager has purchased the old Lord his winter flannels, or till the Countess of Loiter has said all she has to say to the guardsman whom she has met accidentally at Pluckrose the perfumer’s. The three tall fellows, with gold sticks, would see the entire plebeian population of London thrice-sodden in vitriol, before they would advance miladi’s carriage a step, or appear to possess eyes or ears for the infuriated cabman.
Bond street, at this hour, is a study for such observers, as, having gone through an apprenticeship of criticism upon all the other races and grades of men and gentlemen in the world, are now prepared to study their species in its highest fashionable phase—that of “nice persons” at the West End. The Oxford street “swell,” and the Regent street dandy, if seen here, are out of place. The expressive word “quiet” (with its present London signification,) defines the dress, manner, bow, and even physiognomy, of every true denizen of St. James’s and Bond street. The great principle among men of the Clubs, in all these particulars, is tosubdue—to deprive their coats, hats, and manners, of everything sufficiently marked to be caricatured by the satirical or imitated by the vulgar. The triumph ofstyleseems to be that the lines which define it shall be imperceptible to the common eye—that it shall require the difficult education which creates it to know its form and limit. Hence an almost universal error with regard to English gentlemen—that they are repulsive and cold. With a thousand times the heart and real politeness of the Frenchman, they meet you with the simple and unaffected address which would probably be that of shades in Elysium, between whom (we may suppose) there is no longer etiquette or concealment. The only exceptions to this rule in London, are, first and alone, Count D’Orsay, whose extraordinary and original style, marked as it is, is inimitable by any man of less brilliant talents and less beauty of person, and the king’s guardsmen, who are dandies by prescriptive right, or, as it were, professionally. All other men who are members of Brooks’s and the Traveller’s, and frequent Bond street in the flush of the afternoon, are what would be called in America, plain unornamental, and, perhaps, ill-dressed individuals, who would strike you more by the absence than the possession of all the peculiarities which we generally suppose marks a “picked man of countries.” In America, particularly, we are liable to error on this point, as, of the great number of our travellers for improvement, scarce one in a thousand remains longer in London than to visit the Tower and the Thames tunnel. The nine hundred and ninety-nine reside principally, and acquire all they get of foreign manner and style, at Paris—the very most artificial, corrupt, and affected school forgentlemenin the polite world.
Prejudice against any one country is an illiberal feeling, which common reflection should, and which enlightened travel usually does, entirely remove. There is a vulgar prejudice against the English in almost all countries, but more particularly in ours, which blinds its entertainers to much that is admirable, and deprives them of the good drawn from the best models. The troop of scurrilous critics, the class of English bagmen, and errant vulgarians of all kinds, and the industriously-blown coals of old hostilities, are barriers which an educated mind may well overlook, and barriers beyond which lie, no doubt, the best examples of true civilization and refinement the world ever saw. But we are getting into an essay when we should be turning down Bruton street, on our way to the Park, with all the fashion of Bond street and May Fair.
May Fair!what a name for the core of dissipated and exclusive London! A name that brings with it only the scent of crushed flowers in a green field, of a pole wreathed with roses, booths crowded with dancing peasant-girls, and nature in its holyday! This—to express the costly, the courtlike, theso called“heartless” precinct of fashion and art, in their most authentic and envied perfection.Mais, les extrêmes se touchent, and, perhaps, there is more nature in May Fair than in Rose Cottage or Honeysuckle Lodge.
We stroll on through Berkeley square, by Chesterfield and Curzon streets to the Park gate. What an aristocratic quiet reigns here! How plain are the exteriors of these houses:—how unexpressive these doors, without a name, of the luxury and high-born pride within! At the open window of the hall sit the butler and footman, reading the morning paper, while they wait to dispense the “not at home” to callersnotdisappointed. The rooks are noisy in the old trees of Chesterfield house. The painted window-screens of the probably still-slumbering Count D’Orsay, in his bachelor’s den, are closely drawn, and, as we pass Seymour place, a crowd of gay cabs and diplomatic chariots, drawn up before the dark-green door at the farther extremity, announce to you the residence of one whose morning and eveningleveesare alike thronged by distinction and talent—the beautiful Lady Blessington.
This short turn brings us to the Park, which is rapidly filling with vehicles of every fashion and color, and with pedestrians and horsemen innumerable. No hackney coach, street-cab, cart, or pauper, is allowed to pass the porters at the several gates: the road is macadamised and watered, and the grass within the ring is fresh and verdant. The sun here triumphs partially over the skirt of London smoke, which sways backward and forward over the chimneys of Park lane, and, as far as it is possible so near the dingy halo of the metropolis, the gay occupants of these varied conveyances “take the air.”
Let us stand by the railing a moment, and see what comes by. This is the field of display for the coachman, who sits upon his sumptuous hammercloth, and takes more pride in his horses than their owner, and considers them, if not like his own honor and blood, very like his own property. Watch the delicate handling of his ribands, the affected nonchalance of his air, and see how perfectly, how admirably, how beautifully, move his blood horses, and how steadily and well follows the compact carriage! Within (it is a dark-greencalèche, and the liveries are drab, with red edgings) sits the oriental form and bright spiritual face of a banker’s wife, the daughter of a noble race, who might have been, but was not, sacrificed in “marrying into the finance,” and who soars up into the sky of happiness, like the unconscious bird that has escaped the silent arrow of the savage, as if her destiny could not but have been thus fulfilled. Who follows? D’Israeli, alone in his cab; thoughtful, melancholy, disappointed in his political schemes, and undervaluing his literary success, and expressing, in his scholar-like and beautiful profile, as he passes us, both the thirst at his heart and the satiety at his lips. The livery of his “tiger” is neglected, and he drives like a man who has to choose between running and being run against, and takes that which leaves him the most leisure for reflection. Poor D’Israeli! With a kind and generous heart, talents of the most brilliant order, an ambition which consumes his soul, and a father who expects everything from his son; lost for the want of a tact common to understandings fathoms deep below his own, and likely to drive in Hyde Park forty years hence—if he die not of the corrosion of disappointment—no more distinguished than now, and a thousand times more melancholy.[3]
An open barouche follows, drawn by a pair of dark bays, the coachman and footman in suits of plain gray, and no crest on the panels. A lady, of remarkable small person, sits, with the fairest foot ever seen, just peeping from under a cashmere, on the forward cushion, and from under her peculiarly plain and small bonnet burn, in liquid fire, the most lambent and spiritual eyes that night and sleep ever hid from the world. She is a niece of Napoleon, married to an English nobleman; and beside her sits her father, who refused the throne of Tuscany, a noble-looking man, with an expression of calm and tranquil resignation in his face, unusually plain in his exterior, and less alive than most of the gay promenaders to the bright scene passing about him. He will play in the charade at his daughter’ssoiréein the evening, however, and forget his exile and his misfortunes; for he is a fond father and a true philosopher.
[3]This picture of D’Israeli ashe was, notwithstanding its erroneous prophecy, may not be uninteresting now.
[3]
This picture of D’Israeli ashe was, notwithstanding its erroneous prophecy, may not be uninteresting now.
LONDON.
If you dine with all the world at seven, you have, still an hour or more for Hyde Park, and “Rotten Row;” this half mile between Oxford street and Piccadilly, to which the fashion of London confines itself as if the remainder of the bright green Park were forbidden ground, is now fuller than ever. There is the advantage of thiscondenseddrive, that you are sure to see your friends here, earlier or later, in every day—(for wherever you are to go with the horses, the conclusion of the order to the coachman is, “home by the Park”)—and then if there is anything new in the way of an arrival, a pretty foreigner, or a fresh face from the country, some dandy’s tiger leaves his master at the gate, and brings him at his Club, over his coffee, all possible particulars of her name, residence, condition, and whatever other circumstances fall in his way. By dropping in at Lady ——’ssoiréein the evening, if you were interested in the face, you may inform yourself of more than you would have drawn in a year’s acquaintance from the subject of your curiosity.Malaproposto my remark, here comes a turn-out, concerning which and its occupant I have made many inquiries in vain—the pale-colored chariot, with a pair of grays, dashing toward us from the Seymour gate. As it comes by you will see, sitting quite in the corner, and in a very languid and elegant attitude, a slight woman of perhaps twenty-four, dressed in the simplest white cottage-bonnet that could be made, and, with her head down, looking up through heavy black eyelashes, as if she but waited till she had passed a particular object, to resume some engrossing revery. Her features are Italian, and her attitude, always the same indolent one, has also a redolence of that land of repose; but there has been an English taste, and no ordinary one, in the arrangement of that equipage and its dependants; and by the expressions, never mistaken in London, of the well-appointed menials, you may be certain that both master and mistress (if master there be,) exact no common deference. She is always alone, and not often seen in the Park; and whenever I have enquired of those likely to know, I found that she had been observed, but could get no satisfactory information. She disappears by the side toward the Regent’s park, and when once out of the gate, her horses are let off at a speed that distances all pursuit that would not attract observation. There is a look of “Who the deuce can it be?” in the faces of all the mounted dandies, wherever she passes, for it is a face which once seen is not easily thought of with indifference, or forgotten. Immense as London is, a woman of anything like extraordinary beauty would find it difficult to live there, incognito, a week; and how this fair incomprehensible has contrived to elude the curiosity of Hyde-park admiration, for nearly two years, is rather a marvel. There she goes, however, and without danger of being arrested for a flying highwayman, you could scarcely follow.
It is getting late, and, as we turn down toward the Clubs, we shall meet the last and most fashionable comers to the Park. Here is a horseman,[4]surrounded with half a dozen of the first young noblemen of England. He rides a light bay horse with dark legs, whose delicate veins are like the tracery of silken threads beneath the gloss of his limbs, and whose small, animated head seems to express the very essence of speed and fire. He is the most beautiful Park horse in England; and behind follows a high-bred milk-white pony, ridden by a small, faultlessly-dressed groom, who sits the spirited and fretting creature as if he anticipated every movement before the fine hoof rose from the ground. He rides admirably, but his master is more of a study. A luxuriance of black curls escapes from the broad rim of a peculiar hat, and forms a relief to the small and sculpture-like profile of a face as perfect, by every rule of beauty, as the Greek Antinous. It would be too feminine but for the muscular neck and broad chest from which the head rises, and the indications of great personal strength in the Herculean shoulders. His loose coat would disguise the proportions of a less admirable figure; but,au reste, his dress is without fold or wrinkle and nofiguranteof the ballet ever showed finer or more skilfully developed limbs. He is one of the most daring in this country of bold riders; but modifies the stiff English school of equestrianism, with the ease and grace of that of his own country. His manner, though he is ratherAnglomane, is in striking contrast to the grave and quiet air of his companions; and between his recognitions, right and left, to the passing promenaders, he laughs and amuses himself with the joyous and thoughtless gayety of a child. Acknowledged by all his acquaintances to possess splendid talents, this “observed of all observers” is a singular instance of a modern Sybarite—content to sacrifice time, opportunity, and the highest advantages of mind and body, to the pleasure of the moment. He seems exempt from all the usual penalties of such a career. Nothing seems to do its usual work on him—care, nor exhaustion, nor recklessness, nor the disapprobation of the heavy-handed opinion of the world. Always gay, always brilliant, ready to embark at any moment, or at any hazard, in anything that will amuse an hour, one wonders how and where such an unwonted meteor will disappear.
But here comes a carriage without hammercloth or liveries—one of those shabby-genteel conveyances, hired by the week, containing three or four persons in the highest spirits, all talking and gesticulating at once. As the carriage passes the “beau-knot,” (as ——, and his inseparable group are sometimes called) one or two of the dandies spur up, and resting their hands on the windows, offer the compliments of the day to the old lady within, with the most earnest looks of admiration. The gentlemen in her company become silent, and answer to the slight bows of the cavaliers with foreign monosyllables, and presently the coachman whips up once more, the horsemen drop off, and the excessive gayety of the party resumes its tone. You must have been struck, as the carriage passed, with the brilliant whiteness and regularity of the lady’s teeth, and still more with the remarkable play of her lips, which move as if the blood in them were imprisoned lightning. (The figure is strong, but nothing else conveys to my own mind what I am trying to describe.) Energy, grace, fire, rapidity, and a capability of utter abandonment to passion and expression, live visibly on those lips. Her eyes are magnificent. Her nose is regular, with nostrils rimmed round with an expansive nerve, that gives them constantly the kind of animation visible in the head of a fiery Arab. Her complexion is one of those which, dark and wanting in brilliance by day, light up at night with an alabaster fairness; and when the glossy black hair, which is now put away so plainly under her simple bonnet, falls over her shoulders in heavy masses, the contrast is radiant. The gentlemen in that carriage are Rubini, Lablache, and a gentleman who passes for the lady’s uncle; and the lady isJulia Grisi.
The smoke over the heart of the city begins to thicken into darkness, the gas lamps are shooting up, bright and star-like, along the Kensington road, and the last promenaders disappear. And now the world of London, the rich and gay portions of it at least, enjoy that which compensates them for the absence of the bright nights and skies of Italy—a climate within doors, of comfort and luxury, unknown under brighter heavens.
[4]Count D’Orsay.
[4]
Count D’Orsay.
ISLE OF WIGHT—RYDE.
“Instead of parboiling you with asoiréeor a dinner,” said a sensible and kind friend, who called on us at Ryde, “I shall make a pic-nic to Netley.” And on a bright, breezy morning of June, a merry party of some twenty of the inhabitants of the green Isle of Wight shot away from the long pier, in one of the swift boats of those waters, with a fair wind for Southampton.
Ryde is the most American-looking town I have seen abroad; a cluster of white houses and summery villas on the side of a hill, leaning up from the sea. Geneva, on the Seneca lake, resembles it. It is a place of baths, boarding-houses, and people of damaged constitutions, with very select society, and quiet and rather primitive habits. The climate is deliciously soft, and the sun seems always to shine there.
As we got out into the open channel, I was assisting the skipper to tighten his bowline, when a beautiful ship, in the distance, putting about on a fresh tack, caught the sun full on her snowy sails, and seemed to start like an apparition from the sea.
“She’s aliner, sir!” said the bronzed boatman, suspending his haul to give her a look of involuntary admiration.
“An American packet, you mean?”
“They’re the prettiest ships afloat, sir,” he continued, “and the smartest handled. They’re out to New York, and back again, before you can look round, a’most. Ah, I see her flag now—stars and stripes. Can you see it, sir?”
“Are the captains Englishmen, principally?” I asked.
“No, sir! all ‘calkylators,’ sharp as a needle!”
“Thank you,” said I; “I am acalculatortoo!”
The conversation ceased, and I thought from the boatman’s look, that he had more respect than love for us. The cloud of snowy sail traversed the breadth of the channel with the speed of a bird, wheeled again upon her opposite tack, and soon disappeared from view, taking with her the dove of my imagination to return with an olive-branch from home. It must be a cold American heart whose strings are not swept by that bright flag in a foreign land, like a harp with the impassioned prelude of the master.
Cowes was soon upon our lee, with her fairy fleet of yachts lying at anchor—Lord Yarborough’s frigate-looking craft asleep amid its dependent brood, with all its fine tracery of rigging drawn on a cloudless sky, the picture of what it is, and what all vessels seem to me, a thing for pleasure only. Darting about like a swallow on the wing, a small, gayly-painted sloop-yacht, as graceful and slender as the first bow of the new moon, played off the roadstead for the sole pleasure of motion, careless whither; and meantime the low-fringed shores of the Southampton side grew more and more distinct, and before we had well settled upon our cushions, the old tower of the Abbey lay sharp over the bow.
We enjoyed the first ramble through the ruins the better, that to see them was a secondary object. The first was to select a grassy spot for our table. Threading the old unroofed vaults with this errand, the pause of involuntary homage exacted by a sudden burst upon an arch or a fretted window, was natural and true; and for those who are disturbed by the formal and trite enthusiasm of companions who admire by a prompter, this stalking-horse of another pursuit was not an indifferent advantage.
The great roof over the principal nave of the Abbey has fallen in, and lies in rugged and picturesque masses within the Gothic shell—windows, arches, secret staircases, and gray walls, all breaking up the blue sky around, but leaving above, for a smooth and eternal roof, an oblong and ivy-fringed segment of the blue plane of heaven. It seems to rest on those crumbling corners as you stand within.
We selected a rising bank under the shoulder of a rock, grown over with moss and ivy, and following the suggestion of a pretty lover of the picturesque, the shawls and cloaks, with their bright colors, were thrown over the nearest fragments of the roof, and every body unbonneted and assisted in the arrangements. An old woman who sold apples outside the walls was employed to built a fire for our teakettle in a niche where, doubtless, in its holier days, had stood the effigy of a saint; and at the pedestals of a cluster of slender columns our attendants displayed upon a table a show of pasties and bright wines, that, if there be monkish spirits who walk at Netley, we have added a poignant regret to their purgatories, that their airy stomachs can be no morevino ciboque gravati.
We were doing justice to a pretty shoulder of lamb, with mint sauce, when a slender youth, who had been wandering around with a portfolio, took up an artist’s position in the farther corner of the ruins, and began to sketch the scene. I mentally felicitated him on the accident that had brought him to Netley at that particular moment, for a prettier picture than that before him an artist could scarce have thrown together. The inequalities of the floor of the Abbey provided a mossy table for every two or three of the gayly-dressed ladies, and there they reclined in small and graceful groups, their white dresses relieved on the luxuriant grass, and between them, half-buried in moss, the sparkling glasses full of bright wines, and an air of ease and grace over all, which could belong only to the two extremes of Arcadian simplicity, or its high bred imitation. We amused ourselves with the idea of appearing, some six months after, in the middle ground of a landscape, in a picturesque annual; and I am afraid that I detected, on the first suggestion of the idea, a little unconscious attitudinizing in some of the younger members of the party. It was proposed that the artist should be invited to take wine with us; but as a rosy-cheeked page donned his gold hat to carry our compliments, the busy draughtsman was joined by one or two ladies not quite so attractive-looking as himself, but evidently of his own party, and our messenger was recalled.Sequitur—they who would find adventure should travel alone.
The monastic ruins of England derive a very peculiar and touching beauty from the bright veil of ivy which almost buries them from the sun. This constant and affectionate mourner draws from the moisture of the climate a vividness and luxuriance which is found in no other land. Hence the remarkablelovelinessof Netley—a quality which impresses the visiters to this spot, far more than the melancholy usually inspired by decay.
Our gayety shocked some of the sentimental people rambling about the ruins, for it is difficult for those who have not dined to sympathize with the mirth of those who have. How often we mistake for sadness the depression of an empty stomach! How differently authors and travellers would write, if they commenced the day, instead of ending it, with meats and wine! I was led to these reflections by coming suddenly upon a young lady and her companion (possibly her lover,) in climbing a ruined staircase sheathed within the wall of the Abbey. They were standing at one of the windows, quite unconscious of my neighborhood, and looking down upon the gay party of ladies below, who were still amid thedébrisof the feast arranging their bonnets for a walk.
“What a want of soul,” said the lady, “to be eating and drinking in such a place!”
“Somepeople havenosouls,” responded the gentleman.
After this verdict, I thought the best thing I could do was to take care of mybody, and I very carefully backed down the old staircase, which is probably more hazardous now than in the days when it was used to admit damsels and haunches of venison to the reverend fathers.
I reached the bottom in safety, and informed my friends that they had no souls, but they manifested the usual unconcern on the subject, and strolled away through the echoing arches, in search of new points of view and fresh wild-flowers. “Commend me at least,” I thought, as I followed on, “to those whose pulses can be quickened even by a cold pie and a glass of champagne. Sadness and envy are sown thickly enough by the wayside.”
We were embarked once more by the middle of the afternoon, and with a head wind, but smooth water and cool temperature, beat back to Ryde. If the young lady and her lover have forgiven or forgotten us, and the ghosts of Netley, frocked or petticoated, have taken no umbrage, I have not done amiss in marking the day with a stone of the purest white. How much more sensible is a party like this in the open air, and at healthy hours, than the untimely and ceremonious civilities usually paid to strangers. If the world would mend by moralising, however, we should have had a Utopia long ago.
COMPARISON OF THE CLIMATE OFEUROPE AND AMERICA.
One of Hazlitt’s nail-driving remarks is to the effect thathe should like very well to pass the whole of his life in travelling, if he could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterward at home. How far action is necessary to happiness, and how far repose—how far the appetite for novelty and adventure will drive, and how far the attractions of home and domestic comfort will recall us—in short, what are the precise exactions of the antagonist principles in our bosoms of curiosity and sloth, energy and sufferance, hope and memory—are questions which each one must settle for himself, and which none can settle but he who has passed his life in the eternal and fruitless search after the happiest place, climate, and station.
Contentment depends upon many things within our own control, but, with a certain education it depends partly upon things beyond it. To persons delicately constituted or delicately brought up, and to all idle persons, the principal ingredient of the cup of enjoyment isclimate; and Providence, that consults “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” has made the poor and the roughly-nurtured independent of the changes of the wind. Those who have the misfortune to be delicate as well as poor—those, particularly, for whom there is no hope but in a change of clime, but whom pitiless poverty compels to languish in vain after the reviving south, are happily few; but they have thus much more than their share of human calamity.
In throwing together my recollections of the climates with which I have become acquainted in other lands, I am aware that there is a greater difference of opinion on this subject than on most others. A man who has agreeable society about him in Montreal, but who was without friends in Florence, would be very likely to bring the climate in for its share of the difference, and prefer Canada to Italy; and health and circumstances of all kinds affect, in no slight degree, our susceptibility to skies and atmosphere. But it is sometimes interesting to know the impressions of others, even though they agree not with our own; and I will only say of mine on this subject, that they are so far likely to be fair, as I have been blessed with the same perfect health in all countries, and have been happy alike in every latitude and season.
It is almost a matter of course to decry the climate of England. The English writers themselves talk ofsuicidal months; and it is the only country where part of the livery of a mounted groom is his master’s great-coat strapped about his waist. It is certainly a damp climate, and the sun shines less in England than in most other countries. But to persons of full habit this moisture in the air is extremely agreeable; and the high condition of all animals in England, from man downward, proves its healthfulness. A stranger who has been accustomed to a brighter sky, will, at first, find a gloom in the gray light so characteristic of an English atmosphere; but this soon wears off, and he finds a compensation, as far as the eye is concerned, in the exquisite softness of the verdure, and the deep and enduring brightness of the foliage. The effect of this moisture on the skin is singularly grateful. The pores become accustomed to a healthy action, which is unknown in other countries; and the bloom by which an English complexion is known all over the world is the index of an activity in this important part of the system, which, when first experienced, is almost like a new sensation. The transition to a dry climate, such as ours, deteriorates the condition and quality of the skin, and produces a feeling, if I may so express it, like that of beingglazed. It is a common remark in England that an officer’s wife and daughters follow his regiment to Canada at the expense of their complexions; and it is a well-known fact that the bloom of female beauty is, in our country, painfully evanescent.
The climate of America is, in many points, very different from that of France and Great Britain. In the middle and northern states, it is a dry, invigorating, and bracing climate, in which a strong man may do more work than in almost any other, and which makes continual exercise, or occupation of some sort, absolutely necessary. With the exception of the “Indian summer,” and here and there a day scattered through the spring and the hot months, there is no weather tempered so finely, that one would think of passing the day in merely enjoying it, and life is passed, by those who have the misfortune to be idle, in continual and active dread of the elements. The cold is so acrid, and the heat so sultry, and the changes from one to the other are so violent, that no enjoyment can be depended upon out-of-doors, and no system of clothing or protection is good for a day together. He who has full occupation for head and hand (as by far the greatest majority of our countrymen have) may live as long in America as in any portion of the globe—videthe bills of mortality. He whose spirits lean upon the temperature of the wind, or whose nerves require a genial and constant atmosphere, may find more favorable climes; and the habits and delicate constitutions of scholars and people of sedentary pursuits generally, in the United States, prove the truth of the observation.
The habit of regular exercise in the open air, which is found to be so salutary in England, is scarcely possible in America. It is said, and said truly, of the first, that there is no day in the year when a lady may not ride comfortably on horseback—but with us, the extremes of heat and cold, and the tempestuous character of our snows and rains, totally forbid, to a delicate person, anything like regularity in exercise. The consequence is, that the habit rarely exists, and the high and glowing health so common in England, and consequent, no doubt, upon the equable character of the climate in some measure, is with us sufficiently rare to excite remark. “Very English-looking,” is a common phrase, and means very healthy-looking. Still our peoplelast—and though I should define the English climate as the one in which the human frame is in the highest condition, I should say of America, that it is the one in which you could get the most work out of it.
Atmosphere, in England and America, is the first of thenecessariesof life. In Italy, it is the first of itsluxuries. We breathe in America, and walk abroad, without thinking of these common acts but as a means of arriving at happiness. In Italy, to breathe and to walk abroad are themselves happiness. Day after day—week after week—month after month—you wake with the breath of flowers coming in at your open window, and a sky of serene and unfathomable blue, and mornings and evenings of tranquil, assured, heavenly purity and beauty. The few weeks of the rainy season are forgotten in these long halcyon months of sunshine. No one can have lived in Italy a year, who remembers anything but the sapphire sky and the kindling and ever-seen stars. You grow insensibly to associate the sunshine and the moonlight only with the fountain you have lived near, or the columns of the temple you have seen from your window, for on no objects in other lands have you seen their light so constant.
I scarce know how to convey, in language, the effect of the climate of Italy on mind and body. Sitting here, indeed, in the latitude of thirty-nine, in the middle of April, by a warm fire, and with a cold wind whistling at the window, it is difficult to recall it, even to the fancy. I do not know whether life is prolonged, but it is infinitely enriched and brightened, by the delicious atmosphere of Italy. You rise in the morning, thanking Heaven for life and liberty to go abroad. There is a sort of opiate in the air, which makes idleness, that would be the vulture of Prometheus in America, the dove of promise in Italy. It is delicious to do nothing—delicious to stand an hour looking at a Savoyard and his monkey—delicious to sit away the long, silent noon, in the shade of a column, or on the grass of a fountain—delicious to be with a friend without the interchange of an idea—to dabble in a book or look into the cup of a flower. You do not read, for you wish to enjoy the weather. You do not visit, for you hate to enter a door while the weather is so fine. You lie down unwillingly for your siesta in the hot noon, for you fear you may oversleep the first coolness of the long shadows of sunset. The fancy, meantime, is free, and seems liberated by the same languor that enervates the severer faculties; and nothing seems fed by the air but thoughts, which minister to enjoyment.
The climate of Greece is very much that of Italy. The Mediterranean is all beloved of the sun. Life has a value there, of which the rheumatic, shivering, snow breasting, blue-devilled idler of northern regions has no shadow, even in a dream. No wonder Dante mourned and languished for it. No wonder at the sentiment I once heard from distinguished lips—Fuori d’Italia tutto e esilio.
This appears like describing a Utopia; but it is what Italy seemed to me. I have expressed myself much more to my mind, however, in rhyme, for a prose essay is, at best, but a cold medium.
STRATFORD-ON-AVON.
“One-p’un’-five outside, sir, two p’un’ in.”
It was a bright, calm afternoon in September, promising nothing but a morrow of sunshine and autumn, when I stepped in at the “White Horse Cellar,” in Piccadilly, to take my place in the Tantivy coach for Stratford-on-Avon. Preferring the outside of the coach, at least by as much as the difference in the prices, and accustomed from long habit to pay dearest for that which most pleased me, I wrote myself down for the outside, and deposited my two pounds in the horny palm of the old ex-coachman, retired from the box, and playing clerk in this dingy den of parcels and portmanteaus. Supposing my business concluded, I stood a minute speculating on the weather-beaten, cramp-handed old Jehu before me, and trying to reconcile his ideas of “retirement from office” with those of his almost next door neighbor, the hero of Strathfield-Saye.
I had mounted the first stair toward daylight, when a touch on the shoulder with the end of a long whip—a technical “reminder,” which probably came easier to the old driver than the phrasing of a sentence to a “gemman”—recalled me to the cellar.
“Fifteen shillin’, sir,” said he laconically, pointing with the same expressive exponent of his profession to the change for my outside place, which I had left lying on the counter.
“You are at least as honest as the Duke,” I soliloquised as I pocketed the six bright and substantial half-crowns.
I was at the “White Horse Cellar” again the following morning at six, promising myself with great sincerity never to rely again on the constancy of an English sky. It rained in torrents. The four inside places were all taken, and with twelve fellow outsides, I mounted to the wet seat, and begging a little straw by way of cushion from the ostler, spread my umbrella, abandoned my knees with a single effort of mind to the drippings of the driver’s weather-proof upper Benjamin, and away we sped. I was “due” at the house of a hospitable Catholic Baronet, a hundred and two miles from London, at the dinner hour of that day, and to wait till it had done raining in England is to expect the millennium.
London in the morning—I mean the poor man’s morning, daylight—is to me matter for the most speculative and intense melancholy. Hyde park in the sunshine of a bright afternoon, glittering with equipages, and gay with the Aladdin splendors of rank and wealth, is a scene which sends the mercurial qualities of the blood trippingly through the veins. But Hyde park at daylight seen from Piccadilly through fog and rain, is perhaps, of all contrasts, to one who has frequented it in its bright hours, the most dispiriting and dreary. To remember that behind the barricaded and wet windows of Apsley house sleeps the hero of Waterloo—that under these crowded and fog-wrapped houses lie, in their dim chambers breathing of perfume and luxury, the high-born and nobly-moulded creatures who preserve for the aristocracy of England the palm of the world’s beauty—to remember this, and a thousand other associations linked with the spot, is not at all to diminish, but rather to deepen, the melancholy of the picture. Why is it that the deserted stage of a theatre, the echo of an empty ball-room, the loneliness of a frequented promenade in untimely hours—any scene, in short, of gayety gone by but remembered—oppresses and dissatisfies the heart! One would think memory should re-brighten and re-populate such places.
The wheels hissed through the shallow pools in the Macadam road, the regular pattering of the small hoofs in the wet carriage-tracks maintained its quick and monotonous beat on the ear; the silent driver kept his eye on the traces, and “reminded” now and then with but the weight of his slight lash a lagging wheeler or leader, and the complicated but compact machine of which the square foot that I occupied had been so nicely calculated, sped on its ten miles in the hour with the steadfastness of a star in its orbit, and as independent of clouds and rain.
“Est ce que monsieur parle François?” asked at the end of the first stage my right-hand neighbor, a little gentleman, of whom I had hitherto only remarked that he was holding on to the iron railing of the seat with great tenacity.
Having admitted in an evil moment that I had been in France, I was first distinctly made to understand that my neighbor was on his way to Birmingham purely for pleasure, and without the most distant object of business—a point on which he insisted so long, and recurred to so often, that he succeeded at last in persuading me that he was doubtless a candidate for the French clerkship of some exporter of buttons. After listening to an amusing dissertation on the rashness of committing one’s life to an English stage-coach with scarce room enough for the perch of a parrot, and a velocity sodiablement dangereux, I tired of my Frenchman; and, since I could not have my own thoughts in peace, opened a conversation with a straw-bonnet and shawl on my left—the property, I soon discovered, of a very smart lady’s maid, very indignant at having been made to change places with Master George, who, with his mother and her mistress, were dry and comfortable inside. She “would not have minded the outside place,” she said, “for there were sometimes very agreeable gentlemen on the outside,very!—but she had been promised to go inside, and had dressed accordingly; and it was very provoking to spoil a nice new shawl and best bonnet, just because a great school-boy, that had nothing on that would damage, chose not to ride in the rain.”
“Very provoking, indeed!” I responded, letting in the rain upon myself unconsciously, in extending my umbrella forward so as to protect her on the side of the wind.
“Weshould have gone down in the carriage, sir,” she continued, edging a little closer to get the full advantage of my umbrella; “but John the coachman has got thehinfluenzy, and my missis wo’n’t be driven by no other coachman; she’s as obstinate as a mule, sir. And that isn’t all I could tell, sir; but I scorns to hurt the character of one of my own sex.” And the pretty abigail pursed up her red lips, and looked determined not to destroy her mistress’s character—unless particularly requested.
I detest what may be called a proper road-book—even would it be less absurd than it is to write one on a country so well conned as England.
I shall say nothing, therefore, of Marlow, which looked the picture of rural loveliness though seen through fog, nor of Oxford, of which all I remember is that I dined there with my teeth chattering, and my knees saturated with rain. All England is lovely to the wild eye of an American unused to high cultivation; and though my enthusiasm was somewhat damp, I arrived at the bridge over the Avon, blessing England sufficiently for its beauty, and much more for the speed of its coaches.
The Avon, above and below the bridge, ran brightly along between low banks, half sward, half meadow; and on the other side lay the native town of the immortal wool-comber—a gay cheerful-looking village, narrowing in the centre to a closely-built street, across which swung, broad and fair, the sign of the “Red horse.” More ambitious hotels lay beyond, and broader streets; but while Washington Irving is remembered (and that will be while the language lasts,) the quiet inn in which the great Geoffrey thought and wrote of Shakspere will be the altar of the pilgrim’s devotions.
My baggage was set down, the coachman and guard tipped their hats for a shilling, and, chilled to the bone, I raised my hat instinctively to the courtesy of a slender gentlewoman in black, who, by the keys at her girdle should be the landlady. Having expected to see a rosy little Mrs. Boniface, with a brown pinafore and worsted mittens, I made up my mind at once that the inn had changed mistresses. On the right of the old-fashioned entrance blazed cheerily the kitchen fire, and with my enthusiasm rather dashed by my disappointment, I stepped in to make friends with the cook, and get a little warmth and information.
“So your old mistress is dead, Mrs. Cook,” said I rubbing my hands with great satisfaction between the fire and a well-roasted chicken.
“Lauk, sir, no, she isn’t!” answered the rosy lass, pointing with a dredging-box to the same respectable lady in black who was just entering to look after me.
“I beg pardon, sir,” she said, dropping a courtesy; “but are you the gentleman expected by Sir Charles ——?”
“Yes, madam. And can you tell me anything of your predecessor who had the inn in the days of Washington Irving?”
She dropped another courtesy and drew up her thin person to its full height, while a smile of gratified vanity stole out at the corners of her mouth.
“The carriage has been waiting some time for you, sir,” she said, with a softer tone than that in which she had hitherto addressed me; “and you will hardly be at C—— in time for dinner. You will be coming over to-morrow or the day after, perhaps, sir; and then, if you would honor my little room by taking a cup of tea with me, I should be pleased to tell you all about it, sir.”
I remembered a promise I had nearly forgotten, that I would reserve my visit to Stratford till I could be accompanied by Miss Jane Porter, whom I was to have the honor of meeting at my place of destination; and promising an early acceptance of the kind landlady’s invitation, I hurried on to my appointment over the fertile hills of Warwickshire.
I was established in one of those old Elizabethan country-houses, which, with their vast parks, their self-sufficing resources of subsistence and company, and the absolute deference shown on all sides to the lord of the manor, give one the impression rather of a little kingdom with a castle in its heart, than of an abode for a gentleman subject. The house itself, (called, like most houses of this size and consequence in Warwickshire, a “Court,”) was a Gothic, half-castellated square, with four round towers, and innumerable embrasures and windows; two wings in front, probably more modern than the body of the house, and again two long wings extending to the rear, at right angles, and enclosing a flowery and formal parterre. There had been a trench about it, now filled up, and at a short distance from the house stood a polyangular and massive structure, well calculated for defence, and intended as a stronghold for the retreat of the family and tenants in more troubled times. One of these rear wings enclosed a catholic chapel, for the worship of the Baronet and those of his tenants who professed the same faith; while on the northern side, between the house and the garden, stood a large protestant stone church, with a turret and spire, both chapel and church, with their clergyman and priest, dependant on the estate, and equally favored by the liberal and high-minded baronet. The tenantry formed two considerable congregations, and lived and worshipped side by side, with the most perfect harmony—an instance ofrealChristianity, in my opinion, which the angels of heaven might come down to see. A lovely rural grave-yard for the lord and tenants, and a secluded lake below the garden, in which hundreds of wild ducks swam and screamed unmolested, completed the outward features of C—— court.
There are noble houses in England, with a door communicating from the dining room to the stables, that the master and his friends may see their favorites, after dinner, without exposure to the weather. In the place of this ratherbizarreluxury, the oak-panelled and spacious dining-hall of C—— is on a level with the organ loft of the chapel, and when the cloth is removed, the large door between is thrown open, and the noble instrument pours the rich and thrilling music of vespers through the rooms. When the service is concluded, and the lights on the altar extinguished, the blind organist (an accomplished musician, and a tenant on the estate) continues his voluntaries in the dark until the hall-door informs him of the retreat of the company to the drawing-room. There is not only refinement and luxury in this beautiful arrangement, but food for the soul and heart.
I chose my room from among the endless vacant but equally luxurious chambers of the rambling old house; my preference solely directed by the portrait of a nun, one of the family in ages gone by—a picture full of melancholy beauty, which hung opposite the window. The face was distinguished by all that in England marks the gentlewoman of ancient and pure descent; and while it was a woman with the more tender qualities of her sex breathing through her features, it was still a lofty and sainted sister, true to her cross, and sincere in her vows and seclusion. It was the work of a master, probably Vandyke, and a picture in which the most solitary man would find company and communion. On the other walls, and in most of the other rooms and corridors, were distributed portraits of the gentlemen and soldiers of the family, most of them bearing some resemblance to the nun, but differing, as brothers in those wild times may be supposed to have differed from the gentle creatures of the same blood, nursed in the privacy of peace.