After a short visit to Wadham College, where I had the pleasure of meeting the late Vice-Chancellor of the University, Dr. Symmons, we returned to Cuddesdon. Our road lay through the village of Wheatley, where the bells were chiming for service as we passed. Ascending the hills, we alighted and walked; and, by and by, the good Bishop, pointing to a little hamlet not far off, said to me, “there lived, once upon a time, a man named John Milton. There is Forest Hill—there is Shotover—and walking over these hills, he composed Allegro and Penseroso.” How it thrilled my soul, as I listened to his words, and looked delightedly over the scenes to which he directed my attention! We soon reached Cuddesdon, and attended divine service in the parish Church, which was filled chiefly with a rustic people, many of them in hob-nailed shoes, and brown frocks, neatly arrayed, but in the manner of a peasantry, such as we know nothing about in America. The chancel of the Church has been lately restored by the Bishop, and is in excellent taste and keeping throughout. The Church itself is a cruciform one, originally Norman, but much altered, and in parts injured, during successive ages. Its aisles are early English; but many details, in perpendicular, have been introduced in different portions of the pile. Here and there in the wood-work are touches of Jacobean re-modeling. Still, altogether, it is a most interesting Church, and it afforded me great pleasure to worship there, with the rustics and their Bishop, and with a pretty fair representation of the divers ranks of English society, all uniting, happily and sweetly, in their ancestral worship. It was a delicious day, and the glimpses of sky and country, which we gained through the portals and windows, were additional inspirers of gratitude to God. After service, the Bishop led me round the Church, and showed me the grave where one of his predecessors had laid a beloved child. A stone lay upon it, containing the exquisite lament of Bishop Lowth for his daughter, which I remembered to have seen before, but which never seemed half so touching and pathetic as now, while Bishop Wilberforce repeated it from the chiseled inscription:—
“Cara Maria, Vale; at veniet felicius ævum
Quando iterum tecum, sim modo dignus, ero:
Cara redi, læta tum dicam voce, paternos
Eja age in amplexus, cara Maria, redi!”
That evening, as we sat at the Bishop’s table, the bells of Cuddesdon pealed forth a curfew chime. Oh, how sweet! A lady then reminded me that Cuddesdon was one of the “upland hamlets,” alluded to in L’Allegro,—
“Where the merry bells ring round,
And the jocund rebecks sound.”
And so happily closed my day, that, but for some reverting thoughts to the dear home I had left behind me, I must say I went as sweetly to sleep, in the spell of its delights, as did poor Pilgrim in that chamber of his Progress, from whence he was sure of a view of the Delectable Mountains as soon as he should awake in the morning.