English Lands Letters and Kings 2

English Lands Letters and Kings 2

PISA AND DON JUAN, 237

 

MISSOLONGHI, 241

 

CHAPTER VII.

 

KING WILLIAM’S TIME, 252

 

HER MAJESTY VICTORIA, 255

 

MACAULAY, 259

 

IN POLITICS AND VERSE, 265

 

PARLIAMENTARIAN AND HISTORIAN, 270

 

SOME TORY CRITICS, 277

 

TWO GONE-BY STORY TELLERS, 281

 

 

 

 

_ENGLISH LANDS, LETTERS, & KINGS._

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER I.

 

 

The reader will, perhaps, remember that we brought our last year’s ramble

amongst British Lands and Letters to an end--in the charming Lake District

of England. There, we found Coleridge, before he was yet besotted by his

opium-hunger; there, too, we had Church-interview with the stately,

silver-haired poet of Rydal Mount--making ready for his last Excursion

into the deepest of Nature’s mysteries.

 

The reader will recall, further, how this poet and seer, signalized some

of the later years of his life by indignant protests against the

schemes--which were then afoot--for pushing railways among the rural

serenities of Westmoreland.

 

 

_The Lake Country._

 

It is no wonder; for those Lake counties are very beautiful,--as if, some

day, all the tamer features of English landscape had been sifted out, and

the residue of picturesqueness and salient objects of flood and mountain

had been bunched together in those twin regions of the Derwent and of

Windermere. Every American traveller is familiar, of course, with the

charming glimpses of Lake Saltonstall from the Shore-line high-road

between New York and Boston; let them imagine these multiplied by a score,

at frequently recurring intervals of walk or drive; not bald duplications;

for sometimes the waters have longer stretch, and the hills have higher

reach, and fields have richer culture and more abounding verdure;

moreover, occasional gray church towers lift above the trees, and specks

of villages whiten spots in the valleys; and the smoothest and hardest of

roads run along the margin of the lakes; and masses of ivy cover walls,

and go rioting all over the fronts of wayside inns. Then, mountains as

high as Graylock, in Berkshire, pile suddenly out of the quieter

undulations of surface, with high-lying ponds in their gulches; there are

deep swales of heather, and bald rocks, and gray stone cairns that mark

the site of ancient Cumbrian battles.

 

No wonder that a man loving nature and loving solitude, as Wordsworth did

love them, should have demurred to the project of railways, and have

shuddered--as does Ruskin now--at the whistling of the demon of

civilization among those hills. But it has come there, notwithstanding,

and come to stay; and from the station beyond Bowness, upon the

charmingest bit of Windermere, there lies now only an early morning’s walk

to the old home of Wordsworth at Rydal. Immediately thereabout, it is

true, the levels are a little more puzzling to the engineers, so that the

thirteen miles of charming country road which stretch thence--twirling

hither and yon, and up and down--in a northwesterly direction to the town

of Keswick and the Derwent valley, remain now in very much the same

condition as when I walked over them, in leisurely way, fifty odd years

ago this coming spring. The road in passing out from Rydal village goes

near the cottage where poor Hartley Coleridge lived, and earlier, that

strange creature De Quincey (of whom we shall have presently more to say);

it skirts the very margin of Grasmere Lake; this latter being at your

left, while upon the right you can almost see among the near hills the

famous “Wishing Gate;” farther on is Grasmere village, and Grasmere

church-yard--in a corner of which is the grave of the old poet, and a

modest stone at its head on which is graven only the name, William

Wordsworth,--as if anything more were needed! A mile or two beyond, one

passes the “Swan Inn,” and would like to lodge there, and maybe clamber up

Helvellyn, which here shows its great hulk on the right--no miniature

mountain, but one which would hold its own (3,000 feet) among the lesser

ones which shoulder up the horizon at “Crawford’s,” in the White

Mountains.

 

Twirling and winding along the flank of Helvellyn, the road comes

presently upon the long Dunmail Rise, where a Cumbrian battle was fought,

and where, some six hundred feet above the level of Rydal water, one

plunges into mountain savagery. All the while Helvellyn is rising like a

giant on the right, and on the left is the lake of Thirlmere, with its

shores of precipice. An hour more of easy walking brings one to another

crest of hill from which the slope is northward and westward, and from

this point you catch sight of the great mass of Skiddaw; while a little

hitherward is the white speckle of Keswick town; and stretching away from

it to your left lies all the valley of Derwent Water--with a cleft in the

hills at its head, down which the brooklet of Lodore comes--“splashing and

flashing.”

 

 

_Robert Southey._

 

I have taken the reader upon this stroll through a bit of the Lake country

of England that we might find the poet Dr. Southey[1] in his old home at

Keswick. It is not properly in the town, but just across the Greta River,

which runs southward of the town. There, the modest but good-sized house

has been standing for these many years upon a grassy knoll, in its little

patch of quiet lawn, with scattered show of trees--but never so many as to

forbid full view up the long stretch of Derwent Water. His own hexameters

shall tell us something of this view:

 

“I stood at the window beholding

Mountain and lake and vale; the valley disrobed of its verdure;

Derwent, retaining yet from eve a glassy reflection

Where his expanded breast, then still and smooth as a mirror,

Under the woods reposed; the hills that calm and majestic

Lifted their heads into the silent sky, from far Glaramara,

Bleacrag, and Maidenmawr to Grisedal and westernmost Wython,

Dark and distinct they rose. The clouds had gathered above them

High in the middle air, huge purple pillowy masses,

While in the West beyond was the last pale tint of the twilight,

Green as the stream in the glen, whose pure and chrysolite waters

Flow o’er a schistous bed.”

 

This may be very true picturing; but it has not the abounding flow of an

absorbing rural enthusiasm; there is too sharp a search in it for the

assonance, the spondees and the alliteration--to say nothing of the

mineralogy. Indeed, though Southey loved those country ways and heights,

of which I have given you a glimpse, and loved his daily walks round about

Keswick and the Derwent, and loved the bracing air of the mountains--I

think he loved these things as the feeders and comforters of his physical

rather than of his spiritual nature. We rarely happen, in his verse, upon

such transcripts of out-of-door scenes as are inthralling, and captivate

our finer senses; nor does he make the boughs and blossoms tell such

stories as filtered through the wood-craft of Chaucer.

 

Notwithstanding this, it is to that home of Southey, in the beautiful Lake

country, that we must go for our most satisfying knowledge of the man. He

was so wedded to it; he so loved the murmur of the Greta; so loved his

walks; so loved the country freedom; so loved his workaday clothes and cap

and his old shoes;[2] so loved his books--double-deep in his library, and

running over into hall and parlor and corridors; loved, too, the

children’s voices that were around him there--not his own only, but those

always next, and almost his own--those of the young Coleridges. These were

stranded there, with their mother (sister of Mrs. Southey), owing to the

rueful neglect of their father--the bard and metaphysician. I do not think

this neglect was due wholly to indifference. Coleridge sidled away from

his wife and left her at Keswick in that old home of his own,--where he

knew care was good--afraid to encounter her clear, honest,

discerning--though unsympathetic--eyes, while he was putting all resources

and all subterfuges to the feeding of that opiate craze which had fastened

its wolfish fangs upon his very soul.

 

And Southey had most tender and beautiful care for those half-discarded

children of the “Ancient Mariner.” He writes in this playful vein to young

Hartley (then aged eleven), who is away on a short visit:

 

“Mr. Jackson has bought a cow, but he has had no calf since you left

him. Edith [his own daughter] grows like a young giantess, and has

a disposition to bite her arm, which you know is a very foolish

trick. Your [puppy] friend Dapper, who is, I believe, your God-dog,

is in good health, though he grows every summer graver than the

last. I am desired to send you as much love as can be enclosed in a

letter. I hope it will not be charged double on that account at the

post-office. But there is Mrs. Wilson’s love, Mr. Jackson’s, your

Aunt Southey’s, your Aunt Lovell’s and Edith’s; with a _purr_ from

Bona Marietta [the cat], an open-mouthed kiss from Herbert [the

baby], and three wags of the tail from Dapper. I trust they will all

arrive safe. Yr. dutiful uncle.”