Part 21

The August day we left Malvern, and stayed for a drive through Hereford on our way to Shrewsbury, was bright and hot, and Hereford was responsively sultry and dusty. Except for its beautiful cathedral, Hereford is not apparently interesting, though it may really be interesting. It certainly is historically interesting; and if one likes to find one’s self in a place which was considerable in 584, and sent a bishop to the synod of St. Augustine seventeen years later, there is Hereford for the choosing. Otherwise it looks a dull, slovenly large market-town which has not been swept since the last market-day. It has, indeed, the merit of a fine old Tudor house between three intersecting streets and now devoted to a banking business, and I will not pretend that I did not enjoy, quite as much as I enjoyed the cathedral, the old almshouse which we visited somewhere on the length of a mighty long street. A longer, dustier, flatter and hotter street I have not known outside of Ferrara, where all the streets are like that. It must have been in default of other attractions that we were so strenuous about seeing the Coningsby Hospital for old soldiers and servants, but at any rate I am now glad we went. For one thing we should not have known what else to do till our train left for Shrewsbury, and for another it was really very nice to learn what old soldiership or old butlership could come to late in life in that England of snug retreats for so many sorts of superannuation. The kindly inmate who showed me about the place was hurrying himself into a red coat when we stopped at the outer door, and as he proved an old servant and not an old soldier, I thought he might have worn something of a cooler color, say Kendall-green, on such a day. But there was no other fault in him, and if I had been the nobleman who appointed him to that disoccupation after a life-long menial employment, I might well have thought twice before choosing some other domestic of my train. He led me about the thirsty garden, where the vegetables panted among their droughty flower-borders, and had me view not only the Norman archway of the old commandery of the Knights Templars, now spanning a space of pot herbs, but the ruins of the Black Friars’ priory drooping in the heat. Something incongruous in it all tormented the spirit, but how to have it otherwise probably the spirit could not have said. It was better in the cloistered approaches to the pensioners’ quarters, cool and dim under the low ceiling, and I shall always be sorry that I pretended a hurry, and did not view the rooms of my guide. I thought I could do that, any time, in the insensate superstition of the postponing traveller, and now, how far I am from Hereford, recording these vain regrets in the top of a towering New York hotel, overlooking the Hudson!

Or is it rather the Wye? The Wye runs, or slowly, slowly creeps through Hereford, under a most beautiful bridge, which I do not know but you cross in going to the station. I had, or I ought to have had, long thoughts in that dreamy old town, where I would now so willingly pass all the rest of my worst enemy’s life; for it was the market-town of my ancestors, and thither, I dare say, my Welsh-flannel manufacturing great-grandfather sent his goods, as to a bustling metropolis where they would bring the largest price. But at this distance of time, who knows? I hope at least they went by the river Wye in barges laden at his little Breconshire town, and floated either up or down the stream; I do not know which way the Wye runs from The Hay, and in this sort of purely literary reverie it does not matter. What really matters is to get these Welsh flannels into the hands of some mercer in Hereford, and then leave them and go again to the cathedral, which is so beautiful, and so full of bishops, now no longer living. Your foot knocks against their monuments at every step; but the great glory of the cathedral is in its mighty tower, massing itself to heaven from the midst, and looking best, I fancy, from the outside of the church. Only, there, when you have left your fly in the shade of the great chestnuts (I hope they are chestnuts), you will have to run across the blazing pavement if you wish to reach the cathedral alive in that fierce Hereford sun. Before I leave it for another flight to our fly, I wish to bear testimony to the exceptional intelligence of the verger showing us about, in whom I vainly sought a likeness to the verger who twenty years earlier had guided my steps among the tombs of those multitudinous bishops. At that tune I had lately read in an Ecclesiastical Directory of the United Kingdom that a newer canon of the cathedral was of my own name; and I asked the verger if he could show me his seat in the choir. He did so at once, and incidentally noted, “Many’s the ’alf-crown I’ve ’ad from ’im, sir,” when, such is the honor one bears one’s name, I too gave him a half-crown at parting. Had I perhaps been meaning to give him sixpence?

We were sheltered from the sun at last when we started for Shrewsbury, in a train which began almost at once to run between wooded hills under a sky that constantly cleared, constantly clouded, through a country that had been expelled from Eden along with Adam and Eve. It was still very hot, on the outskirts of the afternoon, when we reached Shrewsbury, and drove to the Raven, which we called a bird of prey because it wanted certain shillings for two large, cool rooms, though we should be glad now to pay twice their sum. How haught the spirit grows when once it has tasted the comparative cheapness of English inns! We alleged Chester, we alleged Plymouth, we alleged Liverpool, in expostulation, but the Raven would only offer us two smaller and warmer rooms for fewer shillings, and so we drove to another hotel. We got two fair chambers there with loaded casements, for much less money, and we looked from our pretty windows down upon the green at the foot of St. Mary’s Church, and as far up its heaven-climbing tower as we could crane our necks to see. I can give no idea of our content in that proximity; it was as if we had the lovely and venerable edifice all to ourselves, and as we listened to the music in which it struck the hour and the next quarter of it, our hearts sang in unison with a holy and tasteful joy.

But it seemed as if, though a sultry afternoon at Hereford,

“The day increased from heat to heat,”

in its decline at Shrewsbury. We made a long evening of it before we tried to sleep, and then our joy in the chimed quarters of St. Mary’s clock was still tasteful, but not so holy as it had been at first. The bells had miraculously transferred themselves to the interior of our rooms, which were transformed into deeply murmuring belfries; and we discovered that there were not four but twenty-four quarters in every hour. These were computed by one stroke for the first quarter, two for the next, four for the next, eight for the next, and so on until about a thousand strokes told the final quarter in the twenty-four. In the mean time the heat broke in a passion of rain. A thunder-storm came on, and having the whole night before it, and being quite at leisure, it bellowed and flashed till daylight, when it retired from the scene and left it as hot as ever, and a great deal closer.

If the entire truth must be told, in that old border-town which, after an inarticulate Roman antiquity, had held back the Welsh from England for nearly a thousand years, and finally witnessed the triumph of the Red Rose over the White in the fight where Hotspur Harry fell, we had been allured by the delicious incongruity of seeing “The Belle of New York” in the most alien of all possible environments. We had never seen the piece in its native city; money could not there have overcome our instinct of its abominable vulgarity, but here in a strange land (if our English friends will let us call it so for the sake of the antithesis) we made it an act of patriotism to go. We bought two proud front seats, and found our way to them before a risen curtain, to realize too late that until its fall there was no retreat for us. The theatre at Shrewsbury is not large, under the best of circumstances, and that night it was smaller than ever. Such was the favor of “The Belle of New York” with that generous population, that every seat in the orchestra was taken, and the walls of the edifice pressed suffocatingly inwards. On the stage the heat was so concentrated that in the glare of the foot-lights the faces of the performers steamed with perspiration through the grease-paint of their faces, as they swayed and sang, and leaped and bounded in obedience to the dramatist and composer, and delivered our New York slang in a cockney convention of our local accent which seemed entirely to satisfy the preconceptions of Shrewsbury. Altogether, the piece enjoyed an acceptance with the audience which, in the welding heat, was so little less than stifling that the adventurous strangers, at the close of an act that lasted as long as a Greek trilogy, escaped into the street with what was left of their lives. I know that it is making an exorbitant demand upon the credulity of the reader to relate that upon their return to Shrewsbury a week later these strangers again went to see an American play in the same theatre, which seemed to have been greatly enlarged in the interval, and so deliciously lowered in temperature that in their balcony seats they all but shivered through a melodrama of New York life professing to have been written by Joseph Jefferson. There was an escape of the hero from prison in one scene, and in another a still narrower escape from drowning in the East River at the hands of perhaps the worst reprobate who ever came to a bad end on the stage; and there was a set (I think it is called) of the Brooklyn Bridge, which though attenuated and almost spectralized, recalled the reality as measurably as the English Bobby in blue recalled the massive Irish-American guardians of our public security. The “Shadows of a Great City” did not convince us of our dear and now-lamented Jefferson’s authorship; but it was not so unbearable as “The Belle of New York,” for meteorological reasons, if not for others, and upon the whole it interested, it flattered the mind to the fond conjecture that here in this ancient, this beautiful town, the American drama, if finally neglected in its own land, might be welcomed to a prosperous and honored exile.

St. Mary’s Church was so near at hand that it could hardly fail of repeated visits, and it merited a veneration which might have been more instructed but could not have been more sincere than ours. In every author who treats of it the riches of its stained glass is celebrated, and I will not dwell upon its beauties or even its quaint simplicities. The church is as old as Norman architecture can make it, and it invites with a hundred interesting facts, so that I hardly know how to justify the specific attraction which one piece of modern sculpture there had from me above all other things. The tomb of General Curston by Westonscott has not even the claim of being within the church, where so many memorable and immemorable dead are remembered. It is in the square basement of the tower, and the soldier’s figure is on your right as you enter. He was perhaps not much known to history, being only an adjutant-general, who fell in battle with the Sikhs at Runneggar in 1848, but no one who looks upon his countenance in the living stone can forget it. His left hand rests at his side; his right lies on his heart holding his sword; his soldier’s cloak opens, showing his medals. In the realistically treated face, with its long drooping mustache and whiskers, is a look of dreamy melancholy which, whatever the other qualities of the work, is a masterpiece of expression. Of a period when the commonplace asserted itself with a positive force almost universal in the arts, this simple monument is of classic beauty.

As quaint as any of the earliest inscriptions on the monuments of the church is the tablet in the outer wall of the tower to the bold eighteenth-century aëronaut who came to his death in an endeavored flight from its top to the farther bank of the Severn. It appears that in this as in some other matters--

“Not only we, the latest seed of time, That in the flying of a wheel cry down The past--”

have excelled or even failed. Nor is it probable that the bold youth who perished in 1759 was the first to try imperfect wings in the region where none have yet triumphed; and the faith of his epitapher is not less touching than that of the many who survive to our own day in the belief of antemortem aërostation.

“Let this small monument record the name Of Cadmus, and to future time proclaim How by an attempt to fly from this high spire Across the Sabrine stream he did acquire His fatal end. ’Twas not for want of skill, Or courage to perform the task, he fell. No, no, a faulty cord being drawn too tight, Hurried his soul on high to take her flight.”

The imagination which does not rest its hopes on faulty cords, but follows carefully, on the sure and firm-set earth, in the steps of fact and then flies forward in most inspired conjecture, has its abiding in the memory of the great Darwin, son of Shrewsbury town, and scholar of her famous school. If we cannot count him

“The first of these who know”

among such savans and philosophers as Jenner, Paley, Kennedy, and Butler, his name will carry to further times than any other the glory of that “faire free schoole,” founded by Edward VI., of which even in the seventeenth century it could be written, “Itt hath fowr maisters, and their are sometimes six hundred schollers, and a hansome library thirunto belonging.” The stainless Sir Philip Sidney, and the blood-stained Judge Jeffreys were both of its alumni, but it is the statue of Darwin to which the devotees of evolution will bend their steps in Shrewsbury. It was my fortune to find myself by chance in the house where he lived with his first teacher, the Unitarian minister at Shrewsbury, and to stand in the room where he began, very obliquely and remotely, the studies which changed the thoughts of the world. But the old man he became sits in bronze at a far remove from this in front of the museum of Roman antiquities.

As a museum it is not so amusing as you might expect of a collection containing the remains of Latin civilization from the Roman city of Uriconium, long hidden from fame under the name of Wroxeter, which lies, as my laconic Baedeker tells, “about 5 m. to the S. E.” of Shrewsbury. But probably it is your want of archæology which disables your interest in the province of these remains, while you readily grapple with the fact that the museum itself is part of the old Edward VI. foundation, and that Darwin, whose mild, wise face welcomes you up the way to the building, often went it “unwillingly to school” in that very place.

Another dear son of memory who may be associated with Shrewsbury was the poet Coleridge, vaguely and vagariously great, who in his literary nonage preached in the Unitarian chapel of the town. This chapel (“now used,” my guide says, “by a Theistic congregation,”) was afterwards partially destroyed by a mob which had the divinity of Christ so much at heart that it could not suffer a Socinian place of worship; but it was restored by the King’s command at the public cost, as we ought to remember of that poor George III. whose name we cannot otherwise revere. It was restored in the good architectural taste of the time, and as you stand within it you might readily fancy yourself in some elderly fane of our own once Unitarian Boston.

Darwin’s mother was of that cult, which has enjoyed rather a lion’s share of the social discountenance falling to all dissent in England, but the tale of his fellow-scholars in aftertimes and aforetimes at the school of Edward VIth, shines with so many Established bishops and divines, as to relieve Shrewsbury from any blight falling upon it for that cause. With these, and such statesmen as Halifax, such dramatists as Wycherley, such poets as Ambrose Phillips, such savans as Dr. Jonathan Scott, the orientalist, Dr. Edward Waring, the mathematician, Rev. C. H. Hartsborne, the antiquarian, the venerable foundation is surely safe in the regard of the most liturgical.

But Shrewsbury swarms with all sorts of high associations. Here David, the last of the old British Princes of Wales, was put to death by order of the English King, and here in the last battle between the Roses, the Welsh hope was finally broken in the defeat of the White Rose. Here Falstaff fought with Harry Hotspur “a long hour by the Shrewsbury clock”--probably the very clock in St. Mary’s tower which kept me awake much longer; and here was born the second son of Henry IV., one of the princes whom their wicked uncle Richard slew in the Tower. Here, in one of his flights before his subjects, Charles I. stayed with the brief splendor of his court about him, and minted the plate of the loyal Shropshire gentry, till treachery overtook him (in the local guide-book), and the town fell to the Parliament; and here James II. paused a day when time was getting to be more than money to him. Twice the good Queen Victoria visited the town, and once, long before, the Prince of Darkness himself came, in storm and night, and spoiled the clock of St. Alkmund, leaving a scratch from his claw on the fourth bell. The precise occasion of his visit is not recorded, nor is it told just why the effigy of Richard of York, the father of Edward IV., should be standing, “clad in complete steel,” in front of the beautiful old Market Hall, and stooped in an attitude of such apparent discomfortableness that he is known to some of a light-minded generation as the “Stomach-ache Man.”

The city is the home of those Shrewsbury cakes, famed in _The Ingoldsby Legends_, and once offered to distinguished visitors, who thought them “delicious,” but if they were then no better than now, we can imagine how poor the living of the proudest was in olden times. Rather than the bakery which professes to be the original Pallin’s, or even the Norman castle from which Henry IV. went out to beat Henry Percy and his Yorkish followers, the gentle reader will wish to see the quaint streets and places in which the timbered houses called Tudor abound beyond the like anywhere else in England. There are whole lengths and breadths of these, some stately and tall, and some so humble and low that you can put your hand on their eaves as you pass, but all so charming and so picturesque that you could wish every house in the town to be like them. Failing this, you must console yourself as best you can by visiting the most beautiful old Abbey Church in the world: how old it is I will not say, and how beautiful I cannot, but it fills the heart with reverence and delight. I will not pretend that the inside is as lovely as the outside: that could not be, and any one outlive the joy of it; but it is within and without adorable. You do not require a late afternoon light on the rich façade, but if you have it you are all the happier in its century-mellowed masonry and the old-lace softness of the Gothic window which opens over half its space. From the church you will fancy, inadequately enough, what the whole abbey must have been before it fell into ruin under the hand of Reform. But a relic of the monastic life remains which will repay the enthusiast for going across the way and putting his nose and eyes between the palings of the railroad freight-yard in which it stands, and lingering long upon the sight of it among the grime and dust of the place. It is the pulpit of the refectory where some young brother used to stand to read to the other monks, while they sat at meat, and listened to his prayer and praise, if anything,

and not to one another’s talk. That youthful ghost now reads to a spectral brotherhood, not more dead now than then, to all the loveliness of life; and the porters come and go through their shadowy company, pushing their heavy trucks to and from the goods-vans, and from time to time the engines lift their strident voices above the monotonous silence of the reader’s words; and all is very weird and sad.

What should have possessed us to drive beyond the Abbey Church to view “the quaint Dun Cow Inn,” heaven knows; but that was what we did, and now I can testify that there is really an image of the Dun Cow standing over its door, and challenging the spectator for any associations he has with it. We had none, but I do not say it is not rich in associations for the better-informed. Even we can suppose Coleridge stopping there, and perhaps not being able to pay for the milk it yielded, and so staying on till the youthful Hazlitt came and ordered the meal--in the essay where he has so divinely rendered the consciousness of “the gentleman in the parlor” waiting for his supper. We must have it that he paid the poet’s bill; otherwise we should have seen him still pent and peering sadly from the window, with the image of the Dun Cow watching relentlessly overhead.

There are two bridges crossing the Severn at Shrewsbury: the English Bridge and the Welsh Bridge, by which the Briton and the Sassenach respectively went and came during the ages of border warfare before that last battle of the Roses. Now the bridges are used by travellers who wish to drink so deep of the Severn’s beauty (in which the softly wooded shores are glassed as tenderly as a lover in his mistress’ eyes), that they can never go away from Shrewsbury, but must remain glad captives to the witchery of her wandering up-and-down-hill streets, her Tudor houses, her beautiful churches, her enchanting remains of a past rich in insurpassable events and men. I say insurpassable to round my period; but there is no place in England that is not equally insurpassable in these things.

XIII

NORTHAMPTON AND THE WASHINGTON COUNTRY

Great Brington is the name of the village neighborhood clustering about the church where, under the floor of the nave, the great-great-grandfather of George Washington lies buried. Little Brington is the village neighborhood, hardly separated from the other, where the Washington family dwelt in a house granted them by their cousin, Earl Spencer, when the events of the Civil War drove them from their ancestral place at Sulgrave. To reach the Bringtons from London you must first go to Northampton, where in his time the first Lawrence Washington was twice mayor. The necessity is not a hardship, for to see Northampton, ever so passingly, is a delight such as only English travel can offer. To drive the six miles from Northampton to the Bringtons is another necessity which is another delight, still richer if not greater. Be chosen by a 28th of September, veiled in a fog with sunny rifts in its veil, for your railroad run through a level pastoral scene where stemless blotches of trees shelter white blurs of sheep, and vague canal-boats rest cloudily on the unseen waterways, and you have conditions in which, if you are worthy, the hour of your journey will shrink to a few golden minutes. You will be meanwhile kept by the protecting mists from the manifold facts which in England are apt to pierce you with a thousand appeals and reproaches. The many much-storied places will be faded to wraiths of towers and gates and walls, and you will escape to your destination without that torment of regret for not having constantly stopped on the way from which nothing could otherwise deliver you.