Church Steeple Centered on Moon
Windy Gargoyle Heads Border
Sight-seeing, merely for its own sake, is not to be commended. Hundreds of persons roam through the storied places of England, carrying nothing away but the bare sense of travel. It is not the spectacle that benefits, but the meaning of the spectacle. In the great temples of religion, in those wonderful cathedrals that are the glory of the old world, we ought to feel, not merely the physical beauty but the perfect, illimitable faith, the passionate, incessant devotion, which alone made them possible. The cold intellect of a sceptical age, like the present, could never create such a majestic cathedral as that of Canterbury. Not till the pilgrim feels this truth has he really learned the lesson of such places,—to keep alive in his heart the capacity of self-sacrifice, of toil and of tears, for the grandeur and beauty of the spiritual life. At the tombs of great men we ought to feel something more than a consciousness of the crumbling clay that moulders within,—something more even than knowledge of their memorable words and deeds: we ought, as we ponder on the certainty of death and the evanescence of earthly things, to realise that art at least is permanent, and that no creature can be better employed than in noble effort to make the soul worthy of immortality. The relics of the past, contemplated merely because they are relics, are nothing. You tire, in this old land, of the endless array of ruined castles and of wasting graves; you sicken at the thought of the mortality of a thousand years, decaying at your feet, and you long to look again on roses and the face of childhood, the ocean and the stars. But not if the meaning of the past is truly within your sympathy; not if you perceive its associations as feeling equally with knowledge; not if you truly know that its lessons are not of death but of life! To-day builds over the ruins of yesterday, as well in the soul of man as on the vanishing cities that mark his course. There need be no regret that the present should, in this sense, obliterate the past.
Much, however, as London has changed, and constantly as it continues to change, many objects still remain, and long will continue to remain, that startle and impress the sensitive mind. Through all its wide compass, by night and day, flows and beats a turbulent, resounding tide of activity, and hundreds of trivial and vacuous persons, sordid, ignorant, and commonplace tramp to and fro amid its storied antiquities, heedless of their existence. Through such surroundings, but finding here and there a sympathetic guide or a friendly suggestion, the explorer must make his way,—lonely in the crowd, and walking like one who lives in a dream. Yet he never will drift in vain through a city like this. I went one night into the cloisters of Westminster Abbey—that part, the South Walk, which is still accessible after the gates have been closed. The stars shone down upon the blackening walls and glimmering windows of the great cathedral; the grim, mysterious arches were dimly lighted; the stony pathways, stretching away beneath the venerable building, seemed to lose themselves in caverns of darkness; not a sound was heard but the faint rustling of the grass upon the cloister green. Every stone there is the mark of a sepulchre; every breath of the night wind seemed the whisper of a gliding ghost. There, among the crowded graves, rest Anne Oldfield and Anne Bracegirdle,—in Queen Anne's reign such brilliant luminaries of the stage,—and there was buried the dust of Aaron Hill, poet and dramatist, once manager of Drury Lane, who wroteThe Fair Inconstantfor Barton Booth, and some notably felicitous love-songs. There, too, are the relics of Susanna Maria Arne (Mrs. Theo. Cibber), Mrs. Dancer, Thomas Betterton, and Spranger Barry. Sitting upon the narrow ledge that was the monks' rest, I could touch, close at hand, the tomb of a mitred abbot, while at my feet was the great stone that covers twenty-six monks of Westminster who perished by the Plague nearly six hundred years ago. It would scarcely be believed that the doors of dwellings open upon that gloomy spot; that ladies may sometimes be seen tending flowers upon the ledges that roof those cloister walks. Yet so it is; and in such a place, at such a time, you comprehend better than before the self-centred, serious, ruminant, romantic character of the English mind,—which loves, more than anything else in the world, the privacy of august surroundings and a sombre and stately solitude. It hardly need be said that you likewise obtain here a striking sense of the power of contrast. I was again aware of this, a little later, when, seeing a dim light in St. Margaret's church near by, I entered that old temple and found the men of the choir at their rehearsal, and presently observed on the wall a brass plate which announces that Sir Walter Raleigh was buried here, in the chancel,—after being decapitated for high treason in the Palace Yard outside. Such things are the surprises of this historic capital. This inscription begs the reader to remember Raleigh's virtues as well as his faults,—a plea, surely, that every man might well wish should be made for himself at last. I thought of the verses that the old warrior-poet is said to have left in his Bible, when they led him out to die—
"Even such is time; that takes in trustOur youth, our joys, our all we have,And pays us nought but age and dust;Which, in the dark and silent grave,When we have wandered all our ways,Shuts up the story of our days.—But from this earth, this grave, this dust,My God shall raise me up, I trust."
This church contains a window commemorative of Raleigh, presented by Americans, and inscribed with these lines, by Lowell—
"The New World's sons, from England's breast we drewSuch milk as bids remember whence we came;Proud of her past, wherefrom our future grew,This window we inscribe with Raleigh's name."
It also contains a window commemorative of Caxton, presented by the printers and publishers of London, which is inscribed with these lines by Tennyson—
"Thy prayer was Light—more Light—while Time shall last,Thou sawest a glory growing on the night,But not the shadows which that light would castTill shadows vanish in the Light of Light."
In St. Margaret's—a storied haunt, for shining names alike of nobles and poets—was also buried John Skelton, another of the old bards (obiit 1529), the enemy and satirist of Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More, one of whom he described as "madde Amaleke," and the other as "dawcock doctor." Their renown has managed to survive those terrific shafts; but at least this was a falcon who flew at eagles. Here the poet Campbell was married,—October 11, 1803. Such old churches as this—guarding so well their treasures of history—are, in a special sense, the traveller's blessings. At St. Giles's, Cripplegate, the janitor is a woman; and she will point out to you the lettered stone that formerly marked the grave of Milton. It is in the nave, but it has been moved to a place about twelve feet from its original position,—the remains of the illustrious poet being, in fact, beneath the floor of a pew, on the left of the central aisle, about the middle of the church: albeit there is a story, possibly true, that, on an occasion when this church was repaired, in August, 1790, the coffin of Milton suffered profanation, and his bones were dispersed.
St. Giles', Cripplegate.
Among the monuments hard by is a fine marble bust of Milton, placed against the wall, and it is said, by way of enhancing its value, that George the Third came here to see it.† Several of the neighbouring inscriptions are of astonishing quaintness. The adjacent churchyard—an eccentric, sequestered, lonesome bit of grassy ground, teeming with monuments, and hemmed in with houses, terminates, at one end, in a piece of the old Roman wall of London (A.D. 306),—an adamantine structure of cemented flints—which has lasted from the days of Constantine, and which bids fair to last forever. I shall always remember that strange nook with the golden light of a summer morning shining upon it, the birds twittering among its graves, and all around it such an atmosphere of solitude and rest as made it seem, though in the heart of the great city, a thousand miles from any haunt of man. (It was formally opened as a garden for public recreation on July 8, 1891.)
† This memorial bears the following inscription: "John Milton. Author of 'Paradise Lost.' Born, December 1608. Died, November 1674. His father, John Milton, died, March 1646. They were both interred in this church."
St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, an ancient and venerable temple, the church of the priory of the nuns of St. Helen, built in the thirteenth century, is full of relics of the history of England. The priory, which adjoined this church, has long since disappeared and portions of the building have been restored; but the noble Gothic columns and the commemorative sculpture remain unchanged. Here are the tombs of Sir John Crosby, who built Crosby Place (1466), Sir Thomas Gresham, who founded both Gresham College and the Royal Exchange in London, and Sir William Pickering, once Queen Elizabeth's Minister to Spain and one of the amorous aspirants for her royal hand; and here, in a gloomy chapel, stands the veritable altar at which, it is said, the Duke of Gloster received absolution, after the disappearance of the princes in the Tower. Standing at that altar, in the cool silence of the lonely church and the waning light of afternoon, it was easy to conjure up his slender, slightly misshapen form, decked in the rich apparel that he loved, his handsome, aquiline, thoughtful face, the drooping head, the glittering eyes, the nervous hand that toyed with the dagger, and the stealthy stillness of his person, from head to foot, as he knelt there before the priest and perhaps mocked both himself and heaven with the form of prayer.
Sir John Crosby's Monument.
Every place that Richard touched is haunted by his magnetic presence. In another part of the church you are shown the tomb of a person whose will provided that the key of his sepulchre should be placed beside his body, and that the door should be opened once a year, for a hundred years. It seems to have been his expectation to awake and arise; but the allotted century has passed and his bones are still quiescent.
Gresham's Monument.
How calmly they sleep—those warriors who once filled the world with the tumult of their deeds! If you go into St. Mary's, in the Temple, you will stand above the dust of the Crusaders and see the beautiful copper effigies of them, recumbent on the marble pavement, and feel and know, as perhaps you never did before, the calm that follows the tempest. St. Mary's was built in 1240 and restored in 1828. It would be difficult to find a lovelier specimen of Norman architecture—at once massive and airy, perfectly simple, yet rich with beauty, in every line and scroll.
Goldsmith's House.
There is only one other church in Great Britain, it is said, which has, like this, a circular vestibule. The stained glass windows, both here and at St. Helen's, are very glorious. The organ at St. Mary's was selected by Jeffreys, afterwards infamous as the wicked judge. The pilgrim who pauses to muse at the grave of Goldsmith may often hear its solemn, mournful tones. I heard them thus, and was thinking of Dr. Johnson's tender words, when he first learned that Goldsmith was dead: "Poor Goldy was wild—very wild—but he is so no more." The room in which he died, a heart-broken man at only forty-six, was but a little way from the spot where he sleeps.† The noises of Fleet Street are heard there only as a distant murmur. But birds chirp over him, and leaves flutter down upon his tomb, and every breeze that sighs around the gray turrets of the ancient Temple breathes out his requiem.
† No. 2 Brick Court, Middle Temple.—In 1757-58 Goldsmith was employed by a chemist, near Fish Street Hill. When he wrote his Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe he was living in Green Arbour Court, "over Break-neck Steps." At a lodging in Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, he wrote The Vicar of Wakefield. Afterwards he had lodgings at Canonbury House, Islington, and in 1764, in the Library Staircase of the Inner Temple.
A Bit from Clare Court
Peacock Border
The mind that can reverence historic associations needs no explanation of the charm that such associations possess. There are streets and houses in London which, for pilgrims of this class, are haunted with memories and hallowed with an imperishable light—that not even the dreary commonness of everyday life can quench or dim. Almost every great author in English literature has here left behind him some personal trace, some relic that brings us at once into his living presence. In the time of Shakespeare,—of whom it may be noted that wherever you find him at all you find him in select and elegant neighbourhoods,—St. Helen's parish was a secluded and peaceful quarter of the town; and there the poet had his residence, convenient to the theatre in Blackfriars, in which he is known to have owned a share. It is said that he dwelt at number 134 Aldersgate Street (the house has been demolished), and in that region,—amid all the din of traffic and all the strange adjuncts of a new age,—those who love him are in his company. Milton was born in a court adjacent to Bread Street, Cheapside, and the explorer comes upon him as a resident in St. Bride's churchyard,—where the poet Lovelace was buried,—and at the house which is now No. 19 York Street, Westminster (in later times occupied by Bentham and by Hazlitt), and in Jewin Street, Aldersgate. When secretary to Cromwell he lived in Scotland Yard, where now is the headquarters of the London police. His last home was in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, but the visitor to that spot finds it covered by the Artillery barracks. Walking through King Street, Westminster, you will not forget Edmund Spenser, who died there, in grief and destitution, a victim to the same inhuman spirit of Irish ruffianism that is still disgracing humanity and troubling the peace of the world. Everybody remembers Ben Jonson's terse record of that calamity: "The Irish having robbed Spenser's goods and burnt his house and a little child new-born, he and his wife escaped, and after he died, for lack of bread, in King Street." Jonson himself is closely and charmingly associated with places that may still be seen. He passed his boyhood near Charing Cross—having been born in Hartshorn Lane, now Northumberland Street—and went to the parish school of St. Martin-in-the-Fields; and those who roam around Lincoln's Inn will call to mind that this great poet helped to build it—a trowel in one hand and Horace in the other. His residence, in his days of fame, was just outside of Temple Bar—but all that neighbourhood is new at the present time.
The Mermaid, which he frequented—with Shakespeare, Fletcher, Herrick, Chapman, and Donne—was in Bread Street, but no trace of it remains; and a banking-house stands now on the site of the Devil Tavern, in Fleet Street, where the Apollo Club, which he founded, used to meet. The famous inscription, "O rare Ben Jonson," is three times cut in the Abbey—once in Poets' Corner and twice in the north aisle where he was buried, the smaller of the two slabs marking the place of his vertical grave.
A Bit from Clare Market.
Dryden once dwelt in a narrow, dingy, quaint house, in Fetter Lane,—the street in which Dean Swift has placed the home of Gulliver, and where now (1882) the famous Doomsday Book is kept,—but later he removed to a finer dwelling, in Gerrard Street, Soho, which was the scene of his death. Both buildings are marked with mural tablets and neither of them seems to have undergone much change. (The house in Fetter Lane is gone—1891.) Edmund Burke's house, also in Gerrard Street, is a beer-shop; but his memory hallows the place, and an inscription upon it proudly announces that here he lived. Dr. Johnson's house in Gough Square bears likewise a mural tablet, and, standing at its time-worn threshold, the visitor needs no effort of fancy to picture that uncouth figure shambling through the crooked lanes that lead into this queer, sombre, melancholy retreat. In that house he wrote the first Dictionary of the English language and the immortal letter to Lord Chesterfield. In Gough Square lived and died Hugh Kelly, dramatist, author ofThe School of WivesandThe Man of Reason, and one of the friends of Goldsmith, at whose burial he was present. The historical antiquarian society that has marked many of the literary shrines of London has rendered a great service. The houses associated with Reynolds and Hogarth, in Leicester Square, Byron, in Holies Street, Benjamin Franklin and Peter the Great, in Craven Street, Campbell, in Duke Street, St. James's, Garrick, in the Adelphi Terrace, Michael Farraday, in Blandford Street, and Mrs. Siddons, in Baker Street, are but a few of the historic spots which are thus commemorated. Much, however, remains to be done. One would like to know, for instance, in which room in "The Albany" it was that Byron wroteLara† in which of the houses of Buckingham Street Coleridge had his lodging while he was translatingWallenstein;whereabouts in Bloomsbury Square was the residence of Akenside, who wroteThe Pleasures of Imagination,and of Croly, who wroteSalathiel;or where it was that Gray lived, when he established himself close by Russell Square, in order to be one of the first—as he continued to be one of the most constant—students at the then newly opened British Museum (1759).
† Byron was born at No. 34 Holies Street, Cavendish Square. While he was at school in Dulwich Grove his mother lived in a house in Sloane Terrace. Other houses associated with him are No. 8 St. James Street; a lodging in Bennet Street; No. 2 "The Albany"—a lodging that he rented of Lord Althorpe, and entered on March 28, 1814; and No. 139 Piccadilly, where his daughter, Ada, was born, and where Lady Byron left him. This, at present, is the home of the genial scholar Sir Algernon Borthwick (1893). John Murray's house, where Byron's fragment of Autobiography was burned, is in Albemarle Street. Byron's body, when brought home from Greece, lay in state at No. 25 Great George Street, Westminster, before being taken north, to Hucknall-Torkard church, in Nottinghamshire, for burial.
These, and such as these, may seem trivial things; but Nature has denied an unfailing source of innocent happiness to the man who can find no pleasure in them. For my part, when rambling in Fleet Street it is a special delight to remember even so slight an incident as that recorded of the author of theElegy in a Country Churchyard,—that he once saw there his satirist, Dr. Johnson, rolling and puffing along the sidewalk, and cried out to a friend, "Here comes Ursa Major." For the true lovers of literature "Ursa Major" walks oftener in Fleet Street to-day than any living man.
A good thread of literary research might be profitably followed by him who should trace the footsteps of all the poets that have held, in England, the office of laureate. John Kay was laureate in the reign of Edward IV.; Andrew Bernard in that of Henry VII.; John Skelton in that of Henry VIII.; and Edmund Spenser in that of Elizabeth.
Fleet Street in 1780.
Since then the succession has included the names of Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, Sir William Davenant, John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Nicholas Rowe, Lawrence Eusden, Colley Cibber, William Whitehead, Thomas Wharton, Henry James Pye, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Alfred Tennyson—who, until his death, in 1892, wore, in spotless renown, that
"Laurel greener from the browsOf him that utter'd nothing base."
Most of those bards were intimately associated with London, and several of them are buried in the Abbey. It is, indeed, because so many storied names are written upon gravestones that the explorer of the old churches of London finds so rich a harvest of impressive association and lofty thought. Few persons visit them, and you are likely to find yourself comparatively alone in rambles of this kind. I went one morning into St. Martin—once "in the fields," now in one of the busiest thoroughfares at the centre of the city—and found there only a pew-opener preparing for the service, and an organist playing an anthem. It is a beautiful structure, with its graceful spire and its columns of weather-beaten stone, curiously stained in gray and sooty black, and it is almost as famous for theatrical names as St. Paul's, Covent Garden, or St. George's, Bloomsbury, or St. Clement Danes. Here, in a vault beneath the church, was buried the bewitching and affectionate Nell Gwyn; here is the grave of James Smith, joint author with his brother Horace—who was buried at Tunbridge Wells—ofThe Rejected Addresses;here rests Yates, the original Sir Oliver Surface; and here were laid the ashes of the romantic and sprightly Mrs. Centlivre, and of George Farquhar, whom neither youth, genius, patient labour, nor sterling achievement could save from a life of misfortune and an untimely and piteous death. A cheerier association of this church is with Thomas Moore, the poet of Ireland, who was here married.
Gray's Inn Square.
At St. Giles-in-the-Fields, again, are the graves of George Chapman, who translated Homer, Andrew Marvel, who wrote such lovely lyrics of love, Rich, the manager, who brought out Gay'sBeggar's Opera, and James Shirley, the fine old dramatist and poet, whose immortal couplet has been so often murmured in such solemn haunts as these—
"Only the actions of the justSmell sweet and blossom in the dust."
Shirley lived in Gray's Inn when he was writing his plays, and he was fortunate in the favour of queen Henrietta Maria, wife to Charles the First; but when the Puritan times arrived he fell into misfortune and poverty and became a school-teacher in Whitefriars. In 1666 he was living in or near Fleet Street, and his home was one of the many dwellings that were destroyed in the great fire. Then he fled, with his wife, into the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, where, overcome with grief and terror, they both died, within twenty-four hours of each other, and were buried in the same grave.
Shield with Gargoyle Head
Raise Arms Border
To muse over the dust of those about whom we have read so much—the great actors, thinkers, and writers, the warriors and statesmen for whom the play is ended and the lights are put out—is to come very near to them, and to realise more deeply than ever before their close relationship with our own humanity; and we ought to be wiser and better for this experience. It is good, also, to seek out the favourite haunts of our heroes, and call them up as they were in their lives. One of the happiest accidents of a London stroll was the finding of the Harp Tavern,† in Russell Street, Covent Garden, near the stage door of Drury Lane theatre, which was the accustomed resort of Edmund Kean.
† An account of the Harp, in theVictuallers' Gazette, says that this tavern has had within its doors every actor of note since the days of Garrick, and many actresses, also, of the latter part of the eighteenth century; and it mentions, as visitants there, Dora Jordan, Nance Oldfield, Anne Bracegirdle, Kitty Clive, Harriet Mellon, Barton Booth, Quin, Cibber, Macklin, Grimaldi, Eliza Vestris, and Miss Stephens—who became Countess of Essex.
Carpenters and masons were at work upon it when I entered, and it was necessary almost to creep amid heaps of broken mortar and rubbish beneath their scaffolds, in order to reach the interior rooms. Here, at the end of a narrow passage, was a little apartment, perhaps fifteen feet square, with a low ceiling and a bare floor, in which Kean habitually took his pleasure, in the society of fellow-actors and boon companions, long ago. A narrow, cushioned bench against the walls, a few small tables, a chair or two, a number of churchwarden pipes on the mantlepiece, and portraits of Disraeli and Gladstone, constituted the furniture. A panelled wainscot and dingy red paper covered the walls, and a few cobwebs hung from the grimy ceiling. By this time the old room has been made neat and comely; but then it bore the marks of hard usage and long neglect, and it seemed all the more interesting for that reason.
Kean's seat is at the right, as you enter, and just above it a mural tablet designates the spot,—which is still further commemorated by a death-mask of the actor, placed on a little shelf of dark wood and covered with glass. No better portrait could be desired; certainly no truer one exists. In life this must have been a glorious face. The eyes are large and prominent, the brow is broad and fine, the mouth wide and obviously sensitive, the chin delicate, and the nose long, well set, and indicative of immense force of character. The whole expression of the face is that of refinement and of great and desolate sadness. Kean, as is known from the testimony of one who acted with him,† was always at his best in passages of pathos.
† The mother of Jefferson, the comedian, described Edmund Kean in this way. She was a member of the company at the Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, when he acted there, and it was she who sang for him, when he acted The Stranger, the well-known lines, by Sheridan,—
"I have a silent sorrow here,A grief I'll ne'er impart;It breathes no sigh, it sheds no tear,But it consumes my heart."
To hear him speak Othello's farewell was to hear the perfect music of heart-broken despair. To see him when, as The Stranger, he listened to the song, was to see the genuine, absolute reality of hopeless sorrow. He could, of course, thrill his hearers in the ferocious outbursts-of Richard and Sir Giles, but it was in tenderness and grief that he was supremely great; and no one will wonder at that who looks upon his noble face—so eloquent of self-conflict and suffering—even in this cold and colourless mask of death. It is easy to judge and condemn the sins of a weak, passionate humanity; but when we think of such creatures of genius as Edmund Kean and Robert Burns, we ought to consider what demons in their own souls those wretched men were forced to fight, and by what agonies they expiated their vices and errors. This little tavern-room tells the whole mournful story, with death to point the moral, and pity to breathe its sigh of unavailing regret.
Many of the present frequenters of the Harp are elderly men, whose conversation is enriched with memories of the stage and with ample knowledge and judicious taste in literature and art. They naturally speak with pride of Kean's association with their favourite resort. Often in that room the eccentric genius has put himself in pawn, to exact from the manager of Drury Lane theatre the money needed to relieve the wants of some brother actor. Often his voice has been heard there, in the songs that he sang with so much feeling and sweetness and such homely yet beautiful skill. In the circles of the learned and courtly he never was really at home; but here he filled the throne and ruled the kingdom of the revel, and here no doubt every mood of his mind, from high thought and generous emotion to misanthropical bitterness and vacant levity, found its unfettered expression. They show you a broken panel in the high wainscot, which was struck and smashed by a pewter pot that he hurled at the head of a person who had given him offence; and they tell you at the same time,—as, indeed, is historically true,—that he was the idol of his comrades, the first in love, pity, sympathy, and kindness, and would turn his back, any day, for the least of them, on the nobles who sought his companionship. There is no better place than this in which to study the life of Edmund Kean. Old men have been met with here who saw him on the stage, and even acted with him. The room is the weekly meeting-place and habitual nightly tryst of an ancient club, called the City of Lushington, which has existed since the days of the Regency, and of which these persons are members. The City has its Mayor, Sheriff, insignia, record-book, and system of ceremonials; and much of wit, wisdom, and song may be enjoyed at its civic feasts. The names of its four wards—Lunacy, Suicide, Poverty, and Juniper—are written up in the four corners of the room, and whoever joins must select his ward. Sheridan was a member of it, and so was the Regent; and the present landlord of the Harp (Mr. M'Pherson) preserves among his relics the chairs in which those gay companions sat, when the author presided over the initiation of the prince. It is thought that this club grew out of the society of The Wolves, which was formed by Kean's adherents, when the elder Booth arose to disturb his supremacy upon the stage. But there is no malice in it now. Its purposes are simply convivial and literary, and its tone is that of thorough good-will.†
† A coloured print of this room may be found in that eccentric bookThe Life of an Actor,by Pierce Egan: 1825.
One of the gentlest and most winning traits in the English character is its instinct of companionship as to literature and art. Since the days of the Mermaid the authors and actors of London have dearly loved and deeply enjoyed such odd little fraternities of wit as are typified, not inaptly, by the City of Lushington. There are no rosier hours in my memory than those that were passed, between midnight and morning, in the cosy clubs in London. And when dark days come, and foes harass, and the troubles of life annoy, it will be sweet to think that in still another sacred retreat of friendship, across the sea, the old armour is gleaming in the festal lights, where one of the gentlest spirits that ever wore the laurel of England's love smiles kindly on his comrades and seems to murmur the charm of English hospitality—
"Let no one take beyond this threshold henceWords uttered here in friendship's confidence."
Three Flower Border
It is a cool afternoon in July, and the shadows are falling eastward on fields of waving grain and lawns of emerald velvet. Overhead a few light clouds are drifting, and the green boughs of the great elms are gently stirred by a breeze from the west. Across one of the more distant fields a flock of sable rooks—some of them fluttering and cawing—wings its slow and melancholy flight. There is the sound of the whetting of a scythe, and, near by, the twittering of many birds upon a cottage roof. On either side of the country road, which runs like a white rivulet through banks of green, the hawthorn hedges are shining and the bright sod is spangled with all the wild-flowers of an English summer. An odour of lime-trees and of new-mown hay sweetens the air for many miles around. Far off, on the horizon's verge, just glimmering through the haze, rises the imperial citadel of Windsor. And close at hand a little child points to a gray spire† peering out of a nest of ivy, and tells me that this is Stoke-Pogis church.
† In Gray's time there was no spire on the church—nor is the spire an improvement to the tower.
If peace dwells anywhere upon the earth its dwelling-place is here. You come into this little churchyard by a pathway across the park and through a wooden turnstile; and in one moment the whole world is left behind and forgotten. Here are the nodding elms; here is the yew-tree's shade; here "heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap." All these graves seem very old. The long grass waves over them, and some of the low stones that mark them are entirely shrouded with ivy. Many of the "frail memorials" are made of wood. None of them is neglected or forlorn, but all of them seem to have been scattered here, in that sweet disorder which is the perfection of rural loveliness. There never, of course, could have been any thought of creating this effect; yet here it remains, to win your heart forever. And here, amid this mournful beauty, the little church itself nestles close to the ground, while every tree that waves its branches around it, and every vine that clambers on its surface, seems to clasp it in the arms of love. Nothing breaks the silence but the sighing of the wind in the great yew-tree at the church door,—beneath which was the poet's favourite seat, and where the brown needles, falling, through many an autumn, have made a dense carpet on the turf. Now and then there is a faint rustle in the ivy; a fitful bird-note serves but to deepen the stillness; and from a rose-tree near at hand a few leaves flutter down, in soundless benediction on the dust beneath.
Stoke-Pogis Church.
Gray was laid in the same grave with his mother, "the careful, tender mother of many children, one alone of whom," as he wrote upon her gravestone, "had the misfortune to survive her." Their tomb—a low, oblong, brick structure, covered with a large slab—stands a few feet away from the church wall, upon which is a small tablet to denote its place. The poet's name has not been inscribed above him. There was no need here of "storied urn or animated bust." The place is his monument, and the majestic Elegy—giving to the soul of the place a form of seraphic beauty and a voice of celestial music—is his immortal epitaph.
"There scatter'd oft, the earliest of ye Year,By hands unseen are showers of vi'lets found;The Redbreast loves to build & warble there,And little Footsteps lightly print the ground."
There is a monument to Gray in Stoke Park, about two hundred yards from the church; but it seems commemorative of the builder rather than the poet. They intend to set a memorial window in the church, to honour him, and the visitor finds there a money-box for the reception of contributions in aid of this pious design. Nothing will be done amiss that serves to direct closer attention to his life. It was one of the best lives ever recorded in the history of literature. It was a life singularly pure, noble, and beautiful. In two qualities, sincerity and reticence, it was exemplary almost beyond a parallel; and those are qualities that literary character in the present day has great need to acquire. Gray was averse to publicity. He did not sway by the censure of other men; neither did he need their admiration as his breath of life. Poetry, to him, was a great art, and he added nothing to literature until he had first made it as nearly perfect as it could be made by the thoughtful, laborious exertion of his best powers, superadded to the spontaneous impulse and flow of his genius. More voluminous writers, Charles Dickens among the rest, have sneered at him because he wrote so little. The most colossal form of human complacency is that of the individual who thinks all other creatures inferior who happen to be unlike himself. This reticence on the part of Gray was, in fact, the emblem of his sincerity and the compelling cause of his imperishable renown. There is a better thing than the great man who is always speaking; and that is the great man who only speaks when he has a great word to say. Gray has left only a few poems; but of his principal works each is perfect in its kind, supreme and unapproachable. He did not test merit by reference to ill-formed and capricious public opinion, but he wrought according to the highest standards of art that learning and taste could furnish. His letters form an English classic. There is no purer prose in existence; there is not much that is so pure. But the crowning glory of Gray's nature, the element that makes it so impressive, the charm that brings the pilgrim to Stoke-Pogis church to muse upon it, was the self-poised, sincere, and lovely exaltation of its contemplative spirit. He was a man whose conduct of life would, first of all, purify, expand, and adorn the temple of his own soul, out of which should afterward flow, in their own free way, those choral harmonies that soothe, guide, and exalt the human race. He lived before he wrote. The soul of the Elegy is the soul of the man. It was his thought—which he has somewhere expressed in better words than these—that human beings are only at their best while such feelings endure as are engendered when death has just taken from us the objects of our love. That was the point of view from which he habitually looked upon the world; and no man who has learned the lessons of experience can doubt that he was right.
Gray was twenty-six years old when he wrote the first draft of the Elegy. He began that poem in 1742, at Stoke-Pogis, and he finished and published it in 1751. No visitor to this churchyard can miss either its inspiration or its imagery. The poet has been dead more than a hundred years, but the scene of his rambles and reveries has suffered no material change. One of his yew-trees, indeed, much weakened with age, was some time since blown down, in a storm, and its fragments have been carried away. The picturesque manor house not far distant was once the home of Admiral Penn, father of William Penn the famous Quaker.†
† William Penn and his children are buried in the little Jordans graveyard, not many miles away. The visitor to Stoke-Pogis should not omit a visit to Upton church, Burnham village, and Binfield. Pope lived at Binfield when he wrote his poem on Windsor Forest. Upton claims to have had a share in the inspiration of the Elegy, but Stoke-Pogis was unquestionably his place of residence when he wrote it. Langley Marish ought to be visited also, and Horton—where Milton wrote "L'Allegro," "II Penseroso," and "Comus." Chalfont St. Peter is accessible, where still is standing the house in which Milton finishedParadise Lostand beganParadise Regained;and from there a short drive will take you to Beaconsfield, where you may see Edmund Burke's tablet, in the church, and the monument to Waller, in the churchyard.
All the trees of the region have, of course, waxed and expanded,—not forgetting the neighbouring beeches of Burnham, among which he loved to wander, and where he might often have been found, sitting with his book, at some gnarled wreath of "old fantastic roots." But in its general characteristics, its rustic homeliness and peaceful beauty, this "glimmering landscape," immortalised in his verse, is the same on which his living eyes have looked. There was no need to seek for him in any special spot. The house in which he once lived might, no doubt, be discovered; but every nook and vista, every green lane and upland lawn and ivy-mantled tower of this delicious solitude is haunted with his presence.
The night is coming on and the picture will soon be dark; but never while memory lasts can it fade out of the heart. What a blessing would be ours, if only we could hold forever that exaltation of the spirit, that sweet, resigned serenity, that pure freedom from all the passions of nature and all the cares of life, which comes upon us in such a place as this! Alas, and again alas! Even with the thought this golden mood begins to melt away; even with the thought comes our dismissal from its influence. Nor will it avail us anything now to linger at the shrine. Fortunate is he, though in bereavement and regret, who parts from beauty while yet her kiss is warm upon his lips,—waiting not for the last farewell word, hearing not the last notes of the music, seeing not the last gleams of sunset as the light dies from the sky. It was a sad parting, but the memory of the place can never now be despoiled of its loveliness. As I write these words I stand again in the cool and dusky silence of the poet's church, with its air of stately age and its fragrance of cleanliness, while the light of the western sun, broken into rays of gold and ruby, streams through the painted windows and softly falls upon the quaint little galleries and decorous pews; and, looking forth through the low, arched door, I see the dark and melancholy boughs of the dreaming yew-tree, and, nearer, a shadow of rippling leaves in the clear sunshine of the churchway path. And all the time a gentle voice is whispering, in the chambers of thought—
"No farther seek his merits to disclose,Or draw his frailties from their dread abode:(There they alike in trembling hope repose),The bosom of his Father and his God."