FAREWELL TO HAMPSTEAD
In the house there are portents of impending change. A feeling of clearance is in the air. There is a going-away aspect about the furniture, pictures are down and in odd passages and corners there are bundles and boxes of books piled up for removal. Most conclusive of all, there is beside the gate a board bearing in large red letters the word "Sold." It is the announcement to the world that I am on the march to fresh woods and pastures new. They are beautiful woods and desirable pastures. I have no doubt I shall be as happy amidst them as a very variable temper permits me to be in this very variable world of ours. And yet I confess that the sight of that word "Sold" over the gate gives me an orphaned feeling. It translates itself in my mind into "Finis"—the end of a chapter, the completion of another long stage in a journey that seems now unconscionably short, the cold epitaph of irrevocable things. Taking farewell of a house that has become as familiar to you as your own shadow is like taking leave of something of your spiritual self. It is no longer a thing of bricks and mortar. It is compact of dreams and babbles of a thousand forgotten things that were and will not be again. That is so of any house where you have lived long and seen happy days; but when that house is at Hampstead, a bow-shot from the Heath, the twinge of parting is peculiarly sharp.
I daresay there are as pleasant places under the sun as Hampstead. I do not know them, but I am willing to believe that there are. Pleasanter places, I think, there cannot be. It was Happy Hampstead in the far-off days when the Abbot and monks of Westminster used to come hawking and hunting up its breezy heights and down into the Forest of Middlesex beyond; it was Happy Hampstead when the gallants and fine ladies of two hundred years ago came to Well Walk to drink the waters and dance and philander in the greenwood, and it is Happy Hampstead still, the hill of vision and the inexhaustible playground of the city that spreads, vast and mysterious, at its foot. Here on this sandy spit, with its ponds and its hollows, its birch woods and its hawthorn bushes, its wide vistas and secret places, its sense of the seashore and its feeling of the mountains, is the land where it is always afternoon. Romance clings to it like an odour and mirth is in its very atmosphere. It is the idyll of London.
And what a wealth of memories swarm around its hillsides, peopling its quaint courts and ways, and the very gorse bushes, with the shadows of the past. There is hardly a foot of its soil that is without its story—Dick Turpin riding on moonlit nights over the swarthy heath; Dick Steele taking refuge from his creditors in the lonely cottage on Haverstock Hill, where Sir Charles Sedley had lived before him; the famous Kit-Cat Club with Addison and all the wits of the day holding its summer sessions hard by the Whitestone Pond; Charles Lamb hunting among the gorse bushes for the snuff-box that he had thrown away the day before in a mood of renunciation after a visit with Home to the "Bull and Bush"; Shelley carrying a poor woman whom he had found lying in the snow to Leigh Hunt's house in the Vale of Health; Sir Harry Vane coming out of his house on Rosslyn Hill on his last journey to the Tower; Constable's pines by the Spaniards' Road, and the gibbet tree on which the highwaymen were hanged in chains, that still lies where it fell above the road at North End; Wordsworth walking up the hill to visit Joanna Baillie; and Pope hobnobbing with Arbuthnot; Johnson, in the days of his poverty, tramping up from Fleet Street to see his ailing wife at Frognal; the tales of the Spaniards' Inn, where Mrs. Bardell had her party, and where the rioters assembled for their attack on Mansfield at Ken Wood; the great Pitt, in his madness at Pitt House; Romney nursing his gloomy spirit at Holly Hill; Keats attending his dying brother in Well Walk and writing his immortal odes in Wentworth Place; Crabbe——
But no, the shadows crowd too thick and fast to be recorded. I walk amongst them with the feeling that I, too, seem about to become a shadow, and as I leave the Heath where the children are playing hide-and-seek among the hawthorn trees and the dogs are splashing in the Leg of Mutton Pond and turn into a road where the one brazen word "Sold" seems to fill the landscape, I have a vague sense of attending a funeral. Fortunately it is my own funeral—the funeral of twenty happy years on this sunny eminence—and not the funeral of Happy Hampstead. Men may come and men may go, but neither time nor change can touch the spirit of this enchanted hill.
Jane says that she will never have the heart to return to it. I feel a bit like that myself. I feel that I shall not want to disturb the dream into which those Hampstead days are fading. It will be enough to remember that I too once dwelt in Arcady.