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Seeing Europe with Famous Authors

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In becoming possessor of this place Dickens realized a dream of his
boyhood and ambition of his life. In one of his travelers' sketches he
introduces a "queer small boy" (himself) gazing at Gad's Hill House and
predicting his future ownership, which the author finds annoying
"because it happens to be my house and I believe what he said was true."
When at last the place was for sale, Dickens did not wait to examine it;
he never was inside the house until he went to direct its repair.
Eighteen hundred pounds was the price; a thousand more were expended for
enlargement of the grounds and alterations of the house, which, despite
his declaration that he had "stuck bits upon it in all manner of ways,"
did not greatly change it from what it was when it became the goal of
his childish aspirations. At first it was his summer residence
merely,--his wife came with him the first summer,--but three years later
he sold Tavistock House, and Gad's Hill was thenceforth his home. From
the bustle and din of the city he returned to the haunts of his boyhood
to find restful quiet and time for leisurely work among these "blessed
woods and fields" which had ever held his heart. For nine years after
the death of Dickens Gad's Hill was occupied by his oldest son; its
ownership has since twice or thrice changed.

Its elevated site and commanding view render it one of the most
conspicuous, as it is one of the most lovely, spots in Kent. The mansion
is an unpretentious, old-fashioned, two-storied structure of fourteen
rooms. Its brick walls are surmounted by Mansard roofs above which rises
a bell-turret; a pillared portico, where Dickens sat with his family on
summer evenings, shades the front entrance; wide bay-windows project
upon either side; flowers and vines clamber upon the walls, and a
delightfully home-like air pervades the place. It seems withal a modest
seat for one who left half a million dollars at his death. At the right
of the entrance-hall we see Dickens's library and study, a cosy room
shown in the picture of "The Empty Chair;" here are shelves which held
his books; the panels he decorated with counterfeit bookbacks; the nook
where perched, the mounted remains of his raven, the "Grip" of "Barnaby
Rudge." By this bay-window, whence he could look across the lawn to the
cedars beyond the highway, stood his chair and the desk where he wrote
many of the works by which the world will know him always. Behind the
study was his billiard-room, and upon the opposite side of the hall the
parlor, with the dining-room adjoining it at the back, both bedecked
with the many mirrors which delighted the master.

Opening out of these rooms is a conservatory, paid for out of "the
golden shower from America" and completed but a few days before Dickens'
death, holding yet the ferns he tended. The dining-room was the scene of
much of that emphatic hospitality which it pleased the novelist to
dispense, his exuberant spirits making him the leader in all the jollity
and conviviality of the board. Here he compounded for bibulous guests
his famous "cider-cup of Gad's Hill," and at the same table he was
stricken with death; on a couch beneath yonder window, the one nearest
the hall, he died on the anniversary of the railway accident which so
frightfully imperiled his life. From this window we look out upon a lawn
decked with shrubbery and see across undulating cornfields his beloved
Cobham. From the parqueted hall, stairs lead to the modest
chambers--that of Dickens being above the drawing-room. He lined the
stairway with prints of Hogarth's works, and declared he never came down
the stairs without pausing to wonder at the sagacity and skill which had
produced these masterful pictures of human life.

The house is invested with roses, and parterres of the red geraniums
which the master loved are ranged upon every side. It was some fresh
manifestation of his passion for these flowers that elicited from his
daughter the averment, "Papa, I think when you are an angel your wings
will be made of looking-glasses and your crown of scarlet geraniums."
Beneath a rose-tree not far from the window where Dickens died, a bed
blooming with blue lobelia holds the tiny grave of "Dick" and the tender
memorial of the novelist to that "Best of Birds." The row of gleaming
limes which shadow the porch was planted by Dickens's own hands. The
pedestal of the sundial upon the lawn is a massive balustrade of the old
stone bridge at nearby Rochester, which little David Copperfield crossed
"footsore and weary" on his way to his aunt, and from which Pickwick
contemplated the castle-ruin, the cathedral, the peaceful Medway. At the
left of the mansion are the carriage-house and the school-room of
Dickens' sons. In another portion of the grounds are his tennis-court
and the bowling-green which he prepared, where he became a skilful and
tireless player. The broad meadow beyond the lawn was a later purchase,
and the many limes which beautify it were rooted by Dickens. Here
numerous cricket-matches were played, and he would watch the players or
keep the score "The whole day long."

It was in this meadow that he rehearsed his readings, and his talking,
laughing, weeping, and gesticulating here "all to himself" excited among
his neighbors suspicion of his insanity. From the front lawn a tunnel
constructed by Dickens passes beneath the highway to "The Wilderness," a
thickly-wooded shrubbery, where magnificent cedars up-rear their
venerable forms and many somber firs, survivors of the forest which erst
covered the countryside, cluster upon the hill top. Here Dickens's
favorite dog, the "Linda" of his letters, lies buried. Amid the leafy
seclusion of this retreat, and upon the very spot where Falstaff was
routed by Hal and Poins ("the eleven men in buckram"), Dickens erected
the chalet sent to him in pieces by Fechter, the upper room of which--up
among the quivering boughs, where "birds and butterflies fly in and out,
and green branches shoot in at the windows"--Dickens lined with mirrors
and used as his study in summer. Of the work produced at Gad's Hill--"A
Tale of Two Cities," "The Uncommercial Traveler," "Our Mutual Friend,"
"The Mystery of Edwin Drood," and many tales and sketches of "All the
Year Round"--much was written in this leaf-environed nook; here the
master wrought through the golden hours of his last day of conscious
life, here he wrote his last paragraph and at the close of that June day
let fall his pen, never to take it up again. From the place of the
chalet we behold the view which delighted the heart of Dickens--his desk
was so placed that his eyes would rest upon this view whenever he raised
them from his work--the fields of waving corn, the green expanse of
meadows, the sail-dotted river.



RYDAL MOUNT [Footnote: From "Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent
British Poets."]

BY WILLIAM HOWITT

As you advance a mile or more on the road from Ambleside toward
Grasmere, a lane overhung with trees turns up to the right, and there,
at some few hundred yards from the highway, stands the modest cottage of
the poet, elevated on Rydal Mount, so as to look out over the
surrounding sea of foliage, and to take in a glorious view. Before it,
at some distance across the valley, stretches a high screen of bold and
picturesque mountains; behind, it is overtowered by a precipitous hill,
called Nab-scar; but to the left, you look down over the broad waters of
Windermere, and to the right over the still and more embosomed flood
of Grasmere.

Whichever way the poet pleases to advance from his house, it must be
into scenery of that beauty of mountain, stream, wood, and lake, which
has made Cumberland so famous over all England. He may steal away up
backward from his gate and ascend into the solitary hills, or diverging
into the grounds of Lady Mary Fleming, his near neighbor, may traverse
the deep shades of the woodland, wander along the banks of the rocky
rivulet, and finally stand before the well known waterfall there. If he
descend into the highway, objects of beauty still present themselves.
Cottages and quiet houses here and there glance from their little spots
of Paradise, through the richest boughs of trees; Windermere, with its
wide expanse of waters, its fairy islands, its noble hills, allures his
steps in one direction; while the sweet little lake of Rydal, with its
heronry and its fine background of rocks, invites him in another.

In this direction the vale of Grasmere, the scene of his early married
life, opens before him, and Dunmail-raise and Langdale-pikes lift their
naked corky summits, as hailing him to the pleasures of old
companionship. Into no quarter of this region of lakes, and mountains,
and vales of primitive life, can he penetrate without coming upon ground
celebrated by his muse. He is truly "sole king of rocky Cumberland."

The immediate grounds in which his house stands are worthy of the
country and the man. It is, as its name implies, a mount. Before the
house opens a considerable platform, and around and beneath lie various
terraces and descend various walks, winding on amid a profusion of trees
and luxuriant evergreens. Beyond the house, you ascend various terraces,
planted with trees now completely overshadowing them; and these terraces
conduct you to a level above the house-top, and extend your view of the
enchanting scenery on all sides.

Above you tower the rocks and precipitous slopes of Nab-scar; and below
you, embosomed in its trees, lies the richly ornate villa of Mr. William
Ball, a friend, whose family and the poet's are on such social terms,
that a little gate between their premises opens both to each family
alike. This cottage and grounds were formerly the property of Charles
Lloyd, also a friend, and one of the Bristol and Stowey coterie. Both he
and Lovell have been long dead; Lovell, indeed, was drowned, on a voyage
to Ireland, in the very heyday of the dreams of Pantisocracy, in which
he was an eager participant.

The poet's house, itself, is a proper poet's abode. It is at once
modest, plain, yet tasteful and elegant. An ordinary dining-room, a
breakfast-room in the center, and a library beyond, form the chief
apartments. There are a few pictures and busts, especially those of
Scott and himself, a good engraving of Burns, and the like, with a good
collection of books, few of them very modern.



TWICKENHAM [Footnote: From "Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British
Poets."]

BY WILLIAM HOWITT

It seems that Pope did not purchase the freehold of the house and
grounds at Twickenham, but only a long lease. He took his father and
mother along with him. His father died there the year after, but his
mother continued to live till 1733, when she died at the great age of
ninety-three. For twenty years she had the singular satisfaction of
seeing her son the first poet of his age; carest by the greatest men of
the time, courted by princes, and feared by all the base. No parents
ever found a more tender and dutiful son. With him they shared in honor
the ease and distinction he had acquired. They were the cherished
objects of his home. Swift paid him no false compliment when he said, in
condoling with him on his mother's death, "You are the most dutiful son
I have ever known or heard of, which is a felicity not happening to one
in a million."

The property at Twickenham is properly described by Roscoe as lying on
both sides of the highway, rendering it necessary for him to cross the
road to arrive at the higher and more ornamental part of his gardens. In
order to obviate this inconvenience, he had recourse to the expedient of
excavating a passage under the road from one part of his grounds to the
other, a fact to which he alludes in these lines:

"Know all the toil the heavy world can heap,
Rolls o'er my grotto, nor disturbs my sleep."

The lower part of these grounds, in which his house stood, constituted,
in fact, only the sloping bank of the river, by much the smaller portion
of his territory. The passage, therefore, was very necessary to that far
greater part, which was his wilderness, shrubbery, forest, and every
thing, where he chiefly planted and worked. This passage he formed into
a grotto, having a front of rude stonework opposite to the river and
decorated within with spars, ores, and shells. Of this place he has
himself left this description:

"I have put the last hand to my works of this kind, in happily finishing
the subterranean way and grotto. I found there a spring of the clearest
water, which falls in a perpetual rill, that echoes through the cavern
night and day. From the River Thames you see through my arch, up a walk
of the wilderness, to a kind of open temple wholly composed of shells in
the rustic manner; and from that distance under the temple you look down
through a sleeping arcade of trees, and see the sails on the river
passing suddenly and vanishing, as through a perspective glass. When you
shut the door of this grotto, it becomes, on the instant, from a
luminous room, a camera obscura, on the walls of which all the objects
of the river, hills, woods, and boats are forming a moving picture, in
their visible radiations; and when you have a mind to light it less, it
affords you a very different scene. It is finished with shells,
interspersed with looking-glass in regular forms, and in the ceiling is
a star of the same material, at which, when a lamp of an orbicular
figure of thin alabaster is hung in the middle, a thousand pointed rays
glitter, and are reflected over the place. There are connected to this
grotto, by a narrow passage, two porches, one toward the river, of
smooth stones full of light and open; the other toward the garden,
shadowed with trees, rough with shells, flints, and iron ore. The bottom
is paved with simple pebbles, as is also the adjoining walk up the
wilderness to the temple, in the natural state, agreeing not ill with
the little dripping murmur, and the aquatic idea of the whole place. It
wants nothing to complete it but a good statue with an inscription, like
that beautiful antique one which you know I am so fond of. You will
think I have been very poetical in this description; but it is pretty
near the truth."

But it was not merely in forming this grotto that Pope employed himself;
it was in building and extending his house, which was in a Roman style,
with columns, arcades, and porticos. The designs and elevations of these
buildings may be seen by his own hand in the British Museum, drawn in
his usual way on backs of letters. The following passage, in a letter to
Mr. Digby, will be sufficient to give us his idea of both his Thamesward
garden and his house in a summer view: "No ideas you could form in the
winter could make you imagine what Twickenham is in this warm summer.
Our river glitters beneath the unclouded sun, at the same time that its
banks retain the verdure of showers; our gardens are offering their
first nosegays; our trees, like new acquaintance brought happily
together, are stretching their arms to meet each other, and growing
nearer and nearer every hour. The birds are paying their thanksgiving
songs for the new habitations I have made them. My building rises high
enough to attract the eye and curiosity of the passenger from the river,
where, upon beholding a mixture of beauty and ruin, he inquires, 'What
house is falling, or what church is arising?' So little taste have our
common Tritons for Vitruvius; whatever delight the poetical gods of the
river may take in reflecting on their streams, my Tuscan porticos, or
Ionic pilasters."

Pope's architecture, like his poetry, has been the subject of much and
vehement dispute. On the one hand, his grottos and his buildings have
been vituperated as most tasteless and childish; on the other, applauded
as beautiful and romantic. Into neither of these disputes need we enter.
In both poetry and architecture a bolder spirit and a better taste have
prevailed since Pope's time. With all his foibles and defects, Pope was
a great poet of the critical and didactic kind, and his house and place
had their peculiar beauties. He was himself half inclined to suspect the
correctness of his fancy in such matters, and often rallies himself on
his gimcracks and crotchets in both verse and prose....

Pope's building madness, however, had method in it. Unlike the great
romancer and builder of our time, [Footnote: Sir Walter Scott] he never
allowed such things to bring him into debt. He kept his mind at ease by
such prudence, and soothed and animated it under circumstances of
continued evil by working among his trees, and grottos, and vines, and
at his labors of poetry and translations. At the period succeeding the
rebellion of 1715, when that event had implicated and scattered so many
of his highest and most powerful friends, here he was laboring away at
his "Homer" with a progress which astonished every one. Removed at once
from the dissipations and distractions of London, and from the agreeable
interruptions of such society, he found leisure and health enough here
to give him vigor for exertions astonishing for so weak a frame. The
tastes he indulged here, if they were not faultless according to our
notions, were healthy, and they endured. To the end of his life he
preserved his strong attachment to his house and grounds.



V

OTHER ENGLISH SCENES



STONEHENGE [Footnote: From "English Traits." Published by Houghton,
Mifflin Co. Emerson's second visit to England, during which he saw
Stonehenge, was made in 1847. Of all the Druidical remains in Europe,
Stonehenge is perhaps the most remarkable, altho at Carnac in Brittany
on the northern shore of the Bay of Biscay, are Druidical remains more
numerous, but in general they are smaller and less suggestive of
constructive design.]

BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON

We left the train at Salisbury, and took a carriage to Amesbury, passing
by Old Sarum, a bare, treeless hill, once containing the town which sent
two members to Parliament--now, not a hut--and, arriving at Amesbury, we
stopt at the George Inn. After dinner we walked to Salisbury Plain. On
the broad downs, under the gray sky, not a house was visible, nothing
but Stonehenge, which looked like a group of brown dwarfs in the wide
expanse--Stonehenge and the barrows, which rose like green bosses about
the plain, and a few hay ricks. On the top of a mountain the old temple
would not be more impressive. Far and wide a few shepherds with their
flocks sprinkled the plain, and a bagman drove along the road. It looked
as if the wide margin given in this crowded isle to this primeval temple
were accorded by the veneration of the British race to the old egg out
of which all their ecclesiastical structures and history had proceeded.

Stonehenge is a circular colonnade with a diameter of a hundred feet,
and enclosing a second and third colonnade within. We walked round the
stones, and clambered over them, to wont ourselves with their strange
aspect and groupings, and found a nook sheltered from the wind among
them, where C. [Footnote: Thomas Carlyle, the author of "Sartor
Resartus," etc., etc.] lighted his cigar. It was pleasant to see that
just this simplest of all simple structures--two upright stones and a
lintel laid across--had long outstood all later churches, and all
history, and were like what is most permanent on the face of the planet:
these, and the barrows--(mere mounds of which there are a hundred and
sixty within a circle of three miles about Stonehenge)--like the same
mound on the plain of Troy, which still makes good to the passing
mariner on Hellespont, the vaunt of Homer and the fame of Achilles.
Within the enclosure grow buttercups, nettles, and, all around, wild
thyme, daisy, meadowsweet, goldenrod, thistle, and the carpeting grass.
Over us, larks were soaring and singing--as my friend said: "the larks
which were hatched last year, and the wind which was hatched many
thousand years ago." We counted and measured by paces the biggest
stones, and soon knew as much as any man can suddenly know of the
inscrutable temple. There are ninety-four stones, and there were once
probably one hundred and sixty. The temple is circular and uncovered,
and the situation fixt astronomically--the grand entrances here, and at
Abury, being placed exactly northeast, "as all the gates of the old
cavern temples are." How came the stones here, for these sarsens or
Druidical sandstones are not found in this neighborhood? The sacrificial
stone, as it is called, is the only one in all these blocks that can
resist the action of fire, and, as I read in the books, must have been
brought one hundred and fifty miles.

On almost every stone we found the marks of the mineralogist's hammer
and chisel. The nineteen smaller stones of the inner circle are of
granite. I, who had just come from Professor Sedgwick's Cambridge Museum
of megatheria and mastodons, was ready to maintain that some cleverer
elephants or mylodonta had borne off and laid these rocks one on
another. Only the good beasts must have known how to cut a well-wrought
tenon and mortise, and to smooth the surface of some of the stones. The
chief mystery is, that any mystery should have been allowed to settle on
so remarkable a monument, in a country on which all the muses have kept
their eyes now for eighteen hundred years. We are not yet too late to
learn much more than is known of this structure. Some diligent Fellowes
or Layard will arrive, stone by stone, at the whole history, by that
exhaustive British sense and perseverance, so whimsical in its choice of
objects, which leaves its own Stonehenge or Choir Gaur to the rabbits,
while it opens pyramids, and uncovers Nineveh. Stonehenge, in virtue of
the simplicity of its plan, and its good preservation, is as if new and
recent; and, a thousand years hence, men will thank this age for the
accurate history it will yet eliminate.



MAGNA CHARTA ISLAND [Footnote: From "Pilgrimages to English Shrines."
Magna Charta Island lies in the Thames, a few miles below Windsor.]

BY MRS. S. C. HALL.

The Company of Basket-makers (if there be such a company) have claimed a
large portion of the field--where the barons, "clad in complete steel,"
assembled to confer with King John upon the great charter of English
freedom, by which, Hume truly but coldly says, "very important
liabilities and privileges were either granted or secured to every order
of men in the kingdom; to the clergy, to the barons, and to the
people"--the Basket-makers, we say, have availed themselves of the low
land of Runnymead to cultivate osiers; piles and stacks of "withies" in
various stages of utility, for several hundred yards shut out the river
from the wayfarer, but as he proceeds they disappear, and Cooper's Hill
on the left, the rich flat of Runnymead, the Thames, and the groves of
time-honored Anckerwycke, on its opposite bank, form together a rich and
most interesting picture.

It is now nearly a hundred years since it was first proposed to erect a
triumphal column upon Runnymead; but we have sometimes a strange
antipathy to do what would seem avoidable; the monument to the memory of
Hampden is a sore proof of the niggardliness of liberals to the liberal;
but all monuments to such a man or to such a cause must appear poor; the
names "Hampden" and "Runnymead" suffice; the green and verdant mead,
encircled by the coronet of Cooper's Hill, reposing beneath the sun, and
shadowed by the passing cloud, is an object of reverence and beauty,
immortalized by the glorious liberty which the bold barons of England
forced from a spiritless tyrant.

Tho Cooper's Hill has no claim to the sublimity of mountain scenery, its
peculiar situation commands a broad expanse of country. It rises
abruptly from the Runnymead meadows, and extends its long ridge in a
northwesterly direction; the summit is approached by a winding road,
which from different points of the ascent progressively unfolds a
gorgeous number of fertile views, such as no other country in the
world can give.

"Of hills and dales, and woods, and lawns, and spires,
And glittering towns, and silver streams."

We have heard that the views from Kingswood Lodge--the dwelling of the
hill--are delicious, and that its conservatory contains an exquisite
marble statue of "Hope." On the west of Cooper's Hill is the interesting
estate of Anckerwycke Purnish. Anckerwycke has been for a series of
years in the possession of the family of Harcourt. There is a "meet" of
the three shires in this vicinity--Surrey, Buckinghamshire, and
Berkshire. The views from the grounds of Anekerwycke are said to be of
exceeding beauty, and the kindness of its master makes eloquent the poor
about his domain. All these things, and the sound of the rippling waters
of the Thames, and the songs of the myriad birds which congregate in its
groves, and the legends sprung of its antiquity, all contribute to the
adornment of the gigantic fact that here, King John, sorely against his
will, signed Magna Charta! How that single fact fills the soul, and
nerves the spirit; how proudly the British birthright throbs within our
bosoms. We long to lead the new Napoleon, the absolute Nicholas, the
frank, hospitable, and brave, but sometimes overconfident American, to
this green sward of Runnymead and tell them that here was secured to the
Englishman a liberty which other nations have never enjoyed! Here in the
thickset beauty of yon little island, was our Charter granted.

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