CHAPTER XIX.

_A RETROSPECT._

As I approach the end of my pleasant task, the contrast between the ‘Sweet Hampstead’ of Constable’s (and even of my own) time with the present, makes itself felt with a sense of loss and change that is almost pathetic, so many of its lovely accessories are now missing. It is like contrasting the simplicity and grace of childhood with the conventional man or woman it has subsequently developed.

Instead of rejoicing in its enlargement, and the importance of the townlike outgrowths on its skirts, at the increase of its wealth, and the growing numbers of its population, I like to think of it as it was in those far-away days, when the walk to it through Gospel Oak Fields was such an easy one to me, and the toil of the ascent of what is now the East End Road repaid itself in refreshing draughts of the ‘impalpable thin air’ one breathed upon its summit.

Then Hampstead was a street of village shops upon the slope of the hill, with a broken sky-line of red-roofed, one-storied, brown-brick or weather-boarded houses, with small windows, often glazed with glass that darkened light. Some of the shops had still hanging shutters, and open shop-boards, and many of them half-hatch doors, a few of which, with a fine vein of what was called independence, were comfortably bolted against all comers during meal-times. Not many years ago I met with the same custom in practice at Totnes, on the river Dart.

A narrow footway paved with cobble-stones followed the irregular outlines of the street, and made Hampstead, like other places of pilgrimage, a place of penance also for the pilgrims who chose that narrow way. The shops then were dusky little places, with not much choice of goods; and what there were, were exhibited with little taste in the arrangement of them. What did it signify? Everyone knew of what his neighbours’ stock consisted, and consequently where to get what he wanted. There was no hurry in those days, and plenty of time for everything. Very few people except visitors were to be seen about, and there was a delightful freedom from the sounds of vehicles—a stillness in the uphill street that suggested somnolence. The little windows seemed to blink at the sunshine like the half-shut eyes of the sleek tabby I used to see there taking her afternoon nap amongst the soft goods in one of them.

There was another peculiarity in many of the Hampstead shops: the earth had so accumulated outside the houses that the difference in the level of the street with the floor had to be taken into consideration when entering them, otherwise the unaccustomed customer was very likely to make a more precipitate than graceful entry. This state of things continued even as late as 1895, at the old post-office and elsewhere. Such things as these only proved the antiquity of the delightful suburb, and its unlikeness to other places.

In the old sunny days South End lay, a picturesque little hamlet of red-roofed houses, embosomed in green trees—an integral part of the parish of St. John, but unenfolded in it—a sort of Hagar’s child, outside Hampstead.

I am told that part of South End still remains in South End Road, close to Hampstead Heath Station, and that South End Green—with a few houses that have not been converted to shops, with their palings and gardens, in a very dilapidated condition—also exists. The Green has on it a fountain, erected in 1880 by a lady resident (Miss Crump) to the memory of a relative. It stands on a piece of greensward, surrounded by iron railings, nearly opposite her house, and no doubt answers a very useful purpose, for South End Green is now the terminus of the tramcars, which in summer bring many thirsty children and travellers to Hampstead.

In the days I am recalling, a road ran out of South End over the sloping fields, sweet with white clover flowers, to Parliament Hill, and the mounds like tumuli on the sunk road in the field at the east end of the Heath. I used to think these mounds were barrows, but am told that they only cover the dead hopes of a rapacious Lord of the Manor, who between forty and fifty years ago intended building houses on the field, but, having only a life interest in the estate, was prevented doing so. The road and ground delved for foundations, and thrown up in great heaps here and there, was left neglected and desolate. But Nature soon covered the scarred earth with a green mantle, and turned its unsightliness to beauty. Only a few years ago a subscription was raised amongst the inhabitants of Hampstead, and the fields, with Parliament Hill, and the storied Pancras meadows, were purchased and added to the Heath.

But in my time there were what Shelley, who knew the whole of Hampstead by heart, and remembered it with yearning amidst the lovely landscapes of Italy, called the beautiful meadows near Shepherd’s Fields, and tells his friend Hunt that he often longs for them, and the Hendon Road, and Hampstead lanes, and the pretty entrance to the village from Kentish Town.

How well I remember the Shepherd’s Fields,[286] and the old conduit in them, round the margins of which the yellow stars of the lesser celandine first opened, and Shakespeare’s ladies’ smocks were soonest seen.

Then there were other pretty meadows near Chalk Farm, the peacefulness of which had often been desecrated by duellists, and of which some tragic stories might be told, but not here.

In those days my walk from the White Stone Pond often led to the Nine Elms and the old bench beneath them. The trees grew in a sort of irregular half-circle around it, tall and straight, of no great girth, being planted too close together; they drew one another, as gardeners say, but the boughs and upper branches afforded plenty of shade. The floor was paved with a sort of natural parquetry, made by the interlacing of the roots, which was smooth and polished in places by innumerable feet of loiterers. This was said to have been the favourite resting-place of Pope and Murray.

It did not need much imagination to see them in the serene moonshine of a summer’s night, approaching from the Upper Flask towards the elms. They walked slowly across the turf, on which the moonlight played freaks of exaggeration with the crooked figure of the poet, and caricatured the wide-skirted coat, and three-cornered hat, and the little sword he wore. But Pope is familiar with the ugly shadow, knows himself superior to it, and is indifferent about it. Moreover, at noonday, into whatever assemblage of his fellow-men he takes that defective frame of his, the people crowd around him; or else, as when Sir Joshua Reynolds saw him at a book auction, they make a lane for him to walk through, he bowing prince-like right and left as he passes. I saw the same thing happen to plain little Charlotte Brontë at the Hanover Square Rooms, a compliment at least on a par with the homage shown to the physical beauty of the two lovely Irish girls, the Miss Gunnings.

But to return to the Nine Elms. Here, with the stillness and solitary beauty of Nature, the wits became philosophers, and gave their spirits air and space in higher realms, and exercised themselves in profounder thoughts than any of the salons, clubs, courts of law, or the great town itself, suggested to them. At such times the gravest and profoundest cogitations of the human soul by some celestial attraction rise to the surface, and compel us to oracular confession. At such seasons one can imagine the nature of the little satirist enlarged, and softened, the spirit of the ‘Universal Prayer’ filling his heart, and the natural influence of their surroundings imparting a gravity, mingled with poetic exaltation, to their converse, that must have made it as solemn, and yet more sweet than Johnson’s talk with Boswell in Dr. Taylor’s garden on that serene autumn night, when, emboldened by his friend’s ‘placid and benignant frame of mind,’ his hereafter biographer ‘directed the discourse to a future state.’

Seated here, how often must Pope have seen the shades of friends and kindred spirits flit across the old familiar paths,

‘Under the silent blue, With all its diamonds trembling through and through,[287]

Steele, Gay, Arbuthnot, and the rest, who, as we know, had slipped out of the daylight of the sweet landscape, years and years before, but now

‘Revisiting the glimpses of the moon,’

with nothing earthly about them but the still clinging likeness of their old humanity. No one will ever more dream dreams or see visions under the Nine Elms, that made such a charming landmark from the East Heath, and of which it was locally said that when they fell Windsor Castle would fall also. This prophecy was, of course, attributed to Mother Shipton, whose power to prophesy had ceased long before the Nine Elms were planted, and which, I cannot help thinking, had its origin in a transverse reading of two lines of Edward Coxe’s poem, ‘To Commemorate the Preservation of the Nine Elms on Hampstead Heath’:

‘While yonder castle towers sublime These elms shall brave the threats of time.’

In the years I am writing of, the Heath possessed more natural beauty than at present; then the grove of pine-trees opposite the old citizen’s house who had reared and planted them looked much as it looked when Constable painted it, or as it appeared in Blake’s illustration of Dante, which gave these trees (amongst the artist’s friends) the name of ‘the Dante Wood.’ Twenty years farther on in my remembrance of them, time and winter storms had thinned their boughs, and bared them of their foliage (if one can apply this phrase to their needle-shaped leaves); moreover, the sand and gravel diggers had excavated under and between their roots, leaving them bare, and with scarcely any hold upon the earth, an easy prey to the first hurricane.

But the contrast of the tall, orange-brown trunks with the dusky green, jagged and stretched-out branches made them picturesque objects; and seeing how well they once flourished on that windy eminence, and the proofs some of the best artists have given of the eminently pictorial effect of these trees, let us hope that the conservators of the Heath may be induced to plant others.

In those far-off days the Judge’s Walk, though greatly despoiled of its primal beauty, retained sufficient of it to show what a handsome double grove this triple row of elms, magnificent in height and form in the amplitude of spreading boughs and summer foliage, must have made. A friend of mine possessed a very fine lithographed drawing of the walk when at the apparent acme of its perfection, the recollection of which makes one grieve at its present almost hopeless decadence, the trees pollarded and lopped out of all resemblance of their old forms, and more than three parts of their number dead.

I hear of the planting of flowering shrubs and trees, and of artificial cascades, and as I do so my heart goes back to the wild picturesqueness of the uncared-for Heath, with its groups of storm-bent old hawthorns, its thickets of blackthorn, and twisted crab-apple-trees, pink all over with their rosy blossoms in May.

It was under the Hawthorn bushes on the Heath that Gerard found lilies of the valley growing. I remember its coverts of swarthy furze, twice yearly glorified with golden blossoms, and how on one of these occasions, when every hillock was ablaze with its brightness, Frederika Bremer, whom her friend Mary Howitt had brought with her to the Heath, burst into tears at the first sight of the floral splendour. Her great countryman, Linnæus, is said to have fallen on his knees and thanked God for the sight.

It was on a gorse bush on North End Hill that I first found dodder, ‘like a red harp string winding about it.’ Black alders grew on the margin of the Leg of Mutton Pond, and there used to be wide spaces covered with the creeping willow, and great beds of close-growing whortleberry, which turns red in autumn, and dyed portions of the Upper Heath at that season with its crimson leaves; and upon North End Hill, breast-high coverts of branching ling, with ferns of other species, besides the common _Lastrea felix mas_, and _Athyrium felix femina_.

The vari-coloured clay and sand and gravel that overlies the Heath were then the cause of very picturesque effects. The deep orange and yellows of the gravel-pits were contrasted by the glistering hollows scooped in the hillside beyond Jack Straw’s Castle, where brown gipsies dug the ‘lily-white sand’ with which they supplied London and other housewives for domestic purposes; while in various places there cropped up little hillocks, patched with blue and yellow and ferruginous brown clay, occasionally verging to red, dashing in bits of colour in the landscape with charming pictorial effect. The very irregularity of the surface made one of its chiefest charms, and the wide beds of treacherous sphagnum bordering the old watercourse that drained into the deep-set, sullen-looking Leg of Mutton Pond were full of interest for the botanist. There grew, with their roots in the stream, clusters of turquoise-blue forget-me-nots, and the pretty yellow pimpernel, the ‘creeping Jenny’ of the London area and attic, with purple brook-lime, and pink ragged-robin with torn petals, between groups of straight brown rushes, and beds of flags, and water-mint. The silken flocks of the greater cotton-grass that lie before me grew there once, as did the little red-leaved _Rosa solis_ or sundew, with its crook-shaped flower-scape, and atomic insect remains still held in its hinged leaves; and this brown bit of dried vegetation, a specimen of one of the loveliest of wild flowers, ‘buck-bean,’ with its curiously-feathered corolla, and these unfaded rosy flowers of bog-pimpernel, looking so large by comparison with the slender stems and tiny leaves set in couplets on them—all lived upon those pale-green sphagnum beds.

It was a delight to trace the descendants of the plants old Gerard found upon the Heath, still lingering in their ancient habitats, all but the primrose, the odorous violet, and the lily of the valley, which, before the fashion of the Wells had waned, retired from the Heath to Turner’s Wood, and was wholly lost sight of by outsiders when Lord Mansfield enclosed it in Caen Wood.

In those far-away times gipsies, with glittering eyes, bangled arms, and bright orange or red kerchiefs snooding their blue-black hair, were not the only picturesque figures to be met with on the Heath. It was no unusual thing to meet with speculative lace-makers from Buckinghamshire, in their short red cloaks, frilled with black lace, and wonderful black bonnets, with cushion and pendent vari-coloured bobbins swinging from it, selling their thread lace to chance customers, and taking orders from others who had learned the value of their wares.

But, after all, their appearance was an accident, while the gipsies’ was of common occurrence. You passed a furze clump or a sheltered hollow, and saw no one, but an instant later a nut-brown palmist stood in your path, with speculation in her eyes, and promises of love and fortune on her lips. We have changed all this. The brown hand goes uncrossed with silver, and faith in palmistry is reserved for drawing-room professors of it.