Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861

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We have had a glimpse of London,--let us make an excursion to
Stratford-on-Avon.

Here you see the Shakspeare House as it was,--wedged in between, and
joined to, the "Swan and Maidenhead" Tavern and a mean and dilapidated
brick building, not much worse than itself, however. The first
improvement (as you see in No. 2) was to pull down this brick building.
The next (as you see in No. 3)--was to take away the sign and the
bay-window of the "Swan and Maidenhead" and raise two gables out of its
roof, so as to restore something like its ancient aspect. Then a rustic
fence was put up and the outside arrangements were completed. The
cracked and faded sign projects as we remember it of old. In No. 1 you
may read "THE IMMORTAL SHAKES_peare ... Born in This House_" about as
well as if you had been at the trouble and expense of going there.

But here is the back of the house. Did little Will use to look out at
this window with the bull's-eye panes? Did he use to drink from this old
pump, or the well in which it stands? Did his shoulders rub against this
angle of the old house, built with rounded bricks? It a strange picture,
and sets us dreaming. Let us go in and up-stairs. In this room he was
born. They say so, and we will believe it. Rough walls, rudely boarded
floor, wide window with small panes, small bust of him between two
cactuses in bloom on window-seat. An old table covered with prints and
stereographs, a framed picture, and under it a notice "Copies of this
Portrait" ... the rest, in fine print, can only be conjectured.

Here is the Church of the Holy Trinity, in which he lies buried. The
trees are bare that surround it; see the rooks' nests in their tops.
The Avon is hard by, dammed just here, with flood-gates, like a canal.
Change the season, if you like,--here are the trees in leaf, and in
their shadow the tombs and graves of the mute, inglorious citizens of
Stratford.

Ah, how natural this interior, with its great stained window, its mural
monuments, and its slab in the pavement with the awful inscription! That
we cannot see here, but there is the tablet with the bust we know so
well. But this, after all, is Christ's temple, not Shakspeare's. Here
are the worshippers' seats,--mark how the polished wood glistens,--there
is the altar, and there the open prayer-book,--you can almost read the
service from it. Of the many striking things that Henry Ward Beecher
has said, nothing, perhaps, is more impressive than his account of his
partaking of the communion at that altar in the church where Shakspeare
rests. A memory more divine than his overshadowed the place, and he
thought of Shakspeare, "as he thought of ten thousand things, without
the least disturbance of his devotion," though he was kneeling directly
over the poet's dust.

If you will stroll over to Shottery now with me, we can see the Ann
Hathaway cottage from four different points, which will leave nothing
outside of it to be seen. Better to look at than to live in. A fearful
old place, full of small vertebrates that squeak and smaller articulates
that bite, if its outward promise can be trusted. A thick thatch covers
it like a coarse-haired hide. It is patched together with bricks and
timber, and partly crusted with scaling plaster. One window has the
diamond panes framed in lead, such as we remember seeing of old in one
or two ancient dwellings in the town of Cambridge, hard by. In this view
a young man is sitting, pensive, on the steps which Master William, too
ardent lover, used to climb with hot haste and descend with lingering
delay. Young men die, but youth lives. Life goes on in the cottage just
as it used to three hundred years ago. On the rail before the door sits
the puss of the household, of the fiftieth generation, perhaps, from
that "harmless, necessary cat" which purred round the poet's legs as he
sat talking love with Ann Hathaway. At the foot of the steps is a huge
basin, and over the rail hangs--a dishcloth, drying. In these homely
accidents of the very instant, that cut across our romantic ideals with
the sharp edge of reality, lies one of the ineffable charms of the
sun-picture. It is a little thing that gives life to a scene or a face;
portraits are never absolutely alive, because they do not _wink_.

Come, we are full of Shakspeare; let us go up among the hills and see
where another poet lived and lies. Here is Rydal Mount, the home of
Wordsworth. Two-storied, ivy-clad, hedge-girdled, dropped into a crease
among the hills that look down dimly from above, as if they were hunting
after it as ancient dames hunt after a dropped thimble. In these walks
he used to go "booing about," as his rustic neighbor had it,--reciting
his own verses. Here is his grave in Grasmere. A plain slab, with
nothing but his name. Next him lies Dora, his daughter, beneath a taller
stone bordered with a tracery of ivy, and bearing in relief a lamb and
a cross. Her husband lies next in the range. The three graves have just
been shorn of their tall grass,--in this other view you may see them
half-hidden by it. A few flowering stems have escaped the scythe in the
first picture, and nestle close against the poet's headstone. Hard by
sleeps poor Hartley Coleridge, with a slab of freestone graven with a
cross and a crown of thorns, and the legend, "By thy Cross and Passion,
Good Lord, deliver us."[A] All around are the graves of those whose
names the world has not known. This view, (302,) from above Rydal Mount,
is so Claude-like, especially in its trees, that one wants the solemn
testimony of the double-picture to believe it an actual transcript of
Nature. Of the other English landscapes we have seen, one of the most
pleasing on the whole is that marked 43,--Sweden Bridge, near Ambleside.
But do not fail to notice St. Mary's Church (101) in the same
mountain-village. It grows out of the ground like a crystal, with
spur-like gables budding out all the way up its spire, as if they were
ready to flower into pinnacles, like such as have sprung up all over the
marble multiflora of Milan.

[Footnote A: Miss Martineau, who went to his funeral, and may be
supposed to describe after a visit to the churchyard, gives the
inscription incorrectly. See Atlantic Monthly for May, 1861, p. 552.
Tourists cannot be trusted; stereographs can.]

And as we have been looking at a steeple, let us flit away for a moment
and pay our reverence at the foot of the tallest spire in England,--that
of Salisbury Cathedral. Here we see it from below, looking up,--one of
the most striking pictures ever taken. Look well at it; Chichester has
just fallen, and this is a good deal like it,--some have thought raised
by the same builder. It has bent somewhat (as you may see in these other
views) from the perpendicular; and though it has been strengthened with
clamps and framework, it must crash some day or other, for there has
been a great giant tugging at it day and night for five hundred years,
and it will at last shut up into itself or topple over with a sound and
thrill that will make the dead knights and bishops shake on their stone
couches, and be remembered all their days by year-old children. This is
the first cathedral we ever saw, and none ever so impressed us since.
Vast, simple, awful in dimensions and height, just beginning to grow
tall at the point where our proudest steeples taper out, it fills the
whole soul, pervades the vast landscape over which it reigns, and, like
Niagara and the Alps, abolishes that five- or six-foot personality in
the beholder which is fostered by keeping company with the little life
of the day in its little dwellings. In the Alps your voice is as the
piping of a cricket. Under the sheet of Niagara the beating of your
heart seems to trivial a movement to take reckoning of. In the
buttressed hollow of one of these palaeozoic cathedrals you are ashamed
of your ribs, and blush for the exiguous pillars of bone on which your
breathing structure reposes. Before we leave Salisbury, let us look for
a moment into its cloisters. A green court-yard, with a covered gallery
on its level, opening upon it through a series of Gothic arches. You may
learn more, young American, of the difference between your civilization
and that of the Old World by one look at this than from an average
lyceum-lecture an hour long. Seventy years of life means a great deal to
you; how little, comparatively, to the dweller in these cloisters! You
will have seen a city grow up about you, perhaps; your whole world will
have been changed half a dozen times over. What change for him? The
cloisters are just as when he entered them,--just as they were a hundred
years ago,--just as they will be a hundred years hence.

These old cathedrals are beyond all comparison what are best worth
seeing, of a man's handiwork, in Europe. How great the delight to be
able to bring them, bodily, as it were, to our own firesides! A hundred
thousand pilgrims a year used to visit Canterbury. Now Canterbury visits
us. See that small white mark on the pavement. That marks the place
where the slice of Thomas a Becket's skull fell when Reginald Fitz Urse
struck it off with a "Ha!" that seems to echo yet through the vaulted
arches. And see the broad stains, worn by the pilgrims' knees as they
climbed to the martyr's shrine. For four hundred years this stream of
worshippers was wearing itself into these stones. But there was the
place where they knelt before the altar called "Beckets's Crown."
No! the story that those deep hollows in the marble were made by the
pilgrims' knees is too much to believe,--but there are the hollows, and
that is the story.

And now, if you would see a perfect gem of the art of photography, and
at the same time an unquestioned monument of antiquity which no person
can behold without interest, look upon this,--the monument of the Black
Prince. There is hardly a better piece of work to be found. His marble
effigy lies within a railing, with a sounding board. Above this, on a
beam stretched between two pillars, hang the arms he wore at the Battle
of Poitiers,--the tabard, the shield, the helmet, the gauntlets, and
the sheath that held his sword, which weapon it is said that Cromwell
carried off. The outside casing of the shield has broken away, as you
observe, but the lions or lizards, or whatever they were meant for, and
the flower-de-laces or plumes may still be seen. The metallic scales, if
such they were, have partially fallen from the tabard, or frock, and the
leather shows bare in parts of it.

Here, hard by, is the sarcophagus of Henry IV. and his queen, also
inclosed with a railing like the other. It was opened about thirty years
ago, in presence of the dean of the cathedral. There was a doubt, so
it was said, as to the monarch's body having been really buried there.
Curiosity had nothing to do with it, it is to be presumed. Every
over-ground sarcophagus is opened sooner or later, as a matter of
course. It was hard work to get it open; it had to be sawed. They found
a quantity of hay,--fresh herbage, perhaps, when it was laid upon the
royal body four hundred years ago,--and a cross of twigs. A silken mask
was on the face. They raised it and saw his red beard, his features
well preserved, a gap in the front-teeth, which there was probably no
court-dentist to supply,--the same the citizens looked on four centuries
ago

"In London streets that coronation-day,
When Bolingbroke rode on roan Barbary";

then they covered it up to take another nap of a few centuries,
until another dean has an historical doubt,--at last, perhaps, to be
transported by some future Australian Barnum to the Sidney Museum and
exhibited as the mummy of one of English Pharaohs. Look, too, at the
"Warriors' Chapel," in the same cathedral. It is a very beautiful
stereograph, and may be studied for a long time, for it is full of the
most curious monuments.

Before leaving these English churches and monuments, let us enter, if
but for a moment, the famous Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick. The finest
of the views (323, 324) recalls that of the Black Prince's tomb, as a
triumph of photography. Thus, while the whole effect of the picture is
brilliant and harmonious, we shall find, on taking a lens, that we can
count every individual bead in the chaplet of the monk who is one of the
more conspicuous reliefs on the sarcophagus. The figure of this monk
itself is about half an inch in height, and its face may be completely
hidden by the head of a pin. The whole chapel is a marvel of workmanship
and beauty. The monument of Richard Beauchamp in the centre, with the
frame of brass over the recumbent figure, intended to support the
drapery thrown upon it to protect the statue,--with the mailed shape of
the warrior, his feet in long-pointed shoes resting against the muzzled
bear and the griffin, his hands raised, but not joined,--this monument,
with the tomb of Dudley, Earl of Leicester,--Elizabeth's Leicester,
--and that of the other Dudley, Earl of Warwick,--all enchased in these
sculptured walls and illuminated through that pictured window, where we
can dimly see the outlines of saints and holy maidens,--form a group of
monumental jewels such as only Henry VII.'s Chapel can equal. For these
two pictures (323 and 324) let the poor student pawn his outside-coat,
if he cannot have them otherwise.

Of abbeys and castles there is no end, ago No. 4, Tintern Abbey, is the
finest, on the whole, we have ever seen. No. 2 is also very perfect and
interesting. In both, the masses of ivy that clothe the ruins are given
with wonderful truth and effect. Some of these views have the advantage
of being very well colored. Warwick Castle (81) is one of the best and
most the interesting of the series of castles; Caernarvon is another
still more striking.

We may as well break off here as anywhere, so far as England is
concerned. England is one great burial-ground to an American. As islands
are built up out of the shields of insects, so her soil is made the land
of Burns, and see what one man can do to idealize and glorify the common
life about him! Here is a poor "ten-footer", as we should call it, the
cottage William "Burness" built with his own hands, where he carried his
young bride Agnes, and where the boy Robert, his first-born, was given
to the light and air which he made brighter and freer for mankind. Sit
still and do not speak,--but see that your eyes do not grow dim as these
pictures pass before them: The old hawthorn under which Burns sat with
Highland Mary,--a venerable duenna-like tree, with thin arms and sharp
elbows, and scanty _chevelure_ of leaves; the Auld Brig o' Doon (No.
4),--a daring arch that leaps the sweet stream at a bound, more than
half clad in a mantle of ivy, which has crept with its larva-like
feet beyond the key-stone; the Twa Brigs of Ayr, with the beautiful
reflections in the stream that shines under their eyebrow-arches; and
poor little Alloway Kirk, with its fallen roof and high gables. Lift
your hand to your eyes and draw a long breath,--for what words would
come so near to us as these pictured, nay, real, memories of the dead
poet who made a nation of a province, and the hearts of mankind its
tributaries?

And so we pass to many-towered and turreted and pinnacled Abbotsford,
and to large-windowed Melrose, and to peaceful Dryburgh, where, under a
plain bevelled slab, lies the great Romancer whom Scotland holds only
second in her affections to her great poet. Here in the foreground of
the Melrose Abbey view (436) is a gravestone which looks as if it might
be deciphered with a lens. Let us draw out this inscription from the
black archives of oblivion. Here it is:

In Memory of
Francis Cornel, late
Labourer in Greenwell,
Who died 11th July, 1827,
aged 89 years. Also
Margaret Betty, his
Spouse, who died 2'd Dec'r,
1831, aged 89 years.

This is one charm, as we have said over and over, of the truth-telling
photograph. We who write in great magazines of course float off from the
wreck of our century, on our life-preserving articles, to immortality.
What a delight it is to snatch at the unknown head that shows for an
instant through the wave, and drag it out to personal recognition and
a share in our own sempiternal buoyancy! Go and be photographed on the
edge of Niagara, O unknown aspirant for human remembrance! Do not throw
yourself, O traveller, into Etna, like Empedocles, but be taken by the
camera standing on the edge of the crater! Who is that lady in the
carriage at the door of Burns's cottage? Who is that gentleman in the
shiny hat on the sidewalk in front of the Shakspeare house? Who are
those two fair youths lying dead on a heap of dead at the trench's side
in the cemetery of Melegnano, in that ghastly glass stereograph in our
friend Dr. Bigelow's collection? Some Austrian mother has perhaps seen
her boy's features in one of those still faces. All these seemingly
accidental figures are not like the shapes put in by artists to fill the
blanks in their landscapes, but real breathing persons, or forms that
have but lately been breathing, not found there by chance, but brought
there with a purpose, fulfilling some real human errand, or at least, as
in the last-mentioned picture, waiting to be buried.

Before quitting the British Islands, it would be pleasant to wander
through the beautiful Vale of Avoca in Ireland, and to look on those
many exquisite landscapes and old ruins and crosses which have been so
admirably rendered in the stereograph. There is the Giant's Causeway,
too,--not in our own collection, but which our friend Mr. Waterston
has transplanted with all its basaltic columns to his Museum of Art in
Chester Square. Those we cannot stop to look at now, nor these many
objects of historical or poetical interest which lie before us on our
own table. Such are the pictures of Croyland Abbey, where they kept that
jolly drinking-horn of "Witlaf, King of the Saxons", which Longfellow
has made famous; Bedd-Gelert, the grave of the faithful hound
immortalized by--nay, who has immortalized--William Spencer; the stone
that marks the spot where William Rufus fell by Tyrrel's shaft; the
Lion's Head in Dove Dale, fit to be compared with our own Old Man of the
Mountain; the "Bowder Stone," or the great boulder of Borrowdale; and
many others over which we love to dream at idle moments.

When we began these notes of travel, we meant to take our
fellow-voyagers over the continent of Europe, and perhaps to all the
quarters of the globe. We should make a book, instead of an article, if
we attempted it. Let us, instead of this, devote the remaining space to
an enumeration of a few of the most interesting pictures we have met
with, many of which may be easily obtained by those who will take the
trouble we have taken to find them.

Views of Paris are everywhere to be had, good and cheap. The finest
illuminated or transparent paper view we have ever seen is one of the
Imperial Throne. There is another illuminated view, the Palace of the
Senate, remarkable for the beauty with which it gives the frescoes on
the cupola. We have a most interesting stereograph of the Amphitheatre
of Nismes, with a _bull-fight_ going on in its arena at the time when
the picture was taken. The contrast of the vast Roman structure, with
its massive arched masonry, and the scattered assembly, which seems
almost lost in the spaces once filled by the crowd of spectators who
thronged to the gladiatorial shows, is one of the most striking we have
ever seen. At Quimperle is a house so like the curious old building
lately removed from Dock Square in Boston, that it is commonly taken for
it at the first view. The Roman tombs at Arles and the quaint streets at
Troyes are the only other French pictures we shall speak of, apart from
the cathedrals to be mentioned.

Of the views in Switzerland, it may be said that the Glaciers are
perfect, in the glass pictures, at least. Waterfalls are commonly poor:
the water glares and looks like cotton-wool. Staubbach, with the Vale
of Lauterbrunnen, is an exquisite exception. Here are a few signal
specimens of Art. No. 4018, Seelisberg,--unsurpassed by any glass
stereograph we have ever seen, in all the qualities that make a
faultless picture. No. 4119, Mont Blanc from Sta. Rosa,--the finest
view of the mountain for general effect we have met with. No. 4100,
Suspension-Bridge of Fribourg,--very fine, but makes one giddy to look
at it. Three different views of Goldau, where the villages lie buried
under these vast masses of rock, recall the terrible catastrophe of
1806, as if it had happened but yesterday.

Almost everything from Italy is interesting. The ruins of Rome, the
statues of the Vatican, the great churches, all pass before us but in
a flash, as we are expressed by them on our ideal locomotive. Observe:
next to snow and ice, stone is best rendered in the stereograph. Statues
are given absolutely well, except where there is much foreshortening to
be done, as in this of the Torso, where you see the thigh is unnaturally
lengthened. See the mark on the Dying Gladiator's nose. That is where
Michel Angelo mended it. There is Hawthorne's Marble Faun, (the one
called of Praxiteles,) the Laocooen, the Apollo Belvedere, the Young
Athlete with the Strigil, the Forum, the Cloaca Maxima, the Palace of
the Caesars, the bronze Marcus Aurelius,--those wonders all the world
flocks to see,--the God of Light has multiplied them all for you, and
you have only to give a paltry fee to his servant to own in fee-simple
the best sights that earth has to show.

But look in at Pisa one moment, not for the Leaning Tower and the other
familiar objects, but for the interior of the Campo Santo, with its
holy earth, its innumerable monuments, and the fading frescoes on its
walls,--see! there are the Three Kings of Andrea Orgagna. And there hang
the broken chains that once, centuries ago, crossed the Arno,--standing
off from the wall, so that it seems as if they might clank, if you
jarred the stereoscope. Tread with us the streets of Pompeii for a
moment: there are the ruts made by the chariots of eighteen hundred
years ago,--it is the same thing as stooping down and looking at the
pavement itself. And here is the amphitheatre out of which the Pompeians
trooped when the ashes began to fall round them from Vesuvius. Behold
the famous gates of the Baptistery at Florence,--but do not overlook the
exquisite iron gates of the railing outside; think of them as you enter
our own Common in Boston from West Street, through those portals which
are fit for the gates of--not paradise. Look at this sugar-temple,--no,
it is of marble, and is the monument of one of the Scalas at Verona.
What a place for ghosts that vast _palazzo_ behind it! Shall we stand in
Venice on the Bridge of Sighs, and then take this stereoscopic gondola
and go through it from St. Mark's to the Arsenal? Not now. We will only
look at the Cathedral,--all the pictures under the arches show in our
glass stereograph,--at the Bronze Horses, the Campanile, the Rialto,
and that glorious old statue of Bartholomew Colleoni,--the very image of
what a partisan leader should be, the broad-shouldered, slender-waisted,
stern-featured old soldier who used to leap into his saddle in full
armor, and whose men would never follow another leader when he died.
Well, but there have been soldiers in Italy since his day. Here are
the encampments of Napoleon's army in the recent campaign. This is the
battle-field of Magenta with its trampled grass and splintered trees,
and the fragments of soldiers' accoutrements lying about.

And here (leaving our own collection for our friend's before-mentioned)
here is the great trench in the cemetery of Melegnano, and the heap of
dead lying unburied at its edge. Look away, young maiden and tender
child, for this is what war leaves after it. Flung together, like sacks
of grain, some terribly mutilated, some without mark of injury, all
or almost all with a still, calm look on their faces. The two youths,
before referred to, lie in the foreground, so simple-looking, so like
boys who had been overworked and were lying down to sleep, that one can
hardly see the picture for the tears these two fair striplings bring
into the eyes.

The Pope must bless us before we leave Italy. See, there he stands on
the balcony of St. Peter's, and a vast crowd before him with uncovered
heads as he stretches his arms and pronounces his benediction.

Before entering Spain we must look at the Circus of Gavarni, a
natural amphitheatre in the Pyrenees. It is the most picturesque of
stereographs, and one of the best. As for the Alhambra, we can show that
in every aspect; and if you do not vote the lions in the court of the
same a set of mechanical h----gs and nursery bugaboos, we have no skill
in entomology. But the Giralda, at Seville, is really a grand tower,
worth looking at. The Seville Boston-folks consider it the linchpin,
at least, of this rolling universe. And what a fountain this is in the
Infanta's garden! what shameful beasts, swine and others, lying about on
their stomachs! the whole surmounted by an unclad gentleman squeezing
another into the convulsions of a galvanized frog! Queer tastes they
have in the Old World. At the Fountain of the Ogre in Berne, the giant,
or large-mouthed private person, upon the top of the column, is eating a
little infant as one eats a radish, and has plenty more,--a whole bunch
of such,--in his hand, or about him.

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