“This little stream whose hamlets scarce have names,
This far-off, lonely mother of the Thames.”
One may like to fancy her rejoicing in it, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti rejoiced, who lived in a quaint old house such as she had pictured Master Blower welcoming Cherry into, only a few miles away from Buckland, at Kelmscott. But the place refuses to be identified, and we must be content to conclude that Mistress Cherry’s geography was at fault.
Having chosen a striking setting for her characters, Miss Manning knew well how to give them life. She had a quiet humour, and a kindly knowledge of human nature, which made her draw true portraits. Different readers will have their favourites, but I think few will fail to be drawn to honest Nathaniel Blower, priest and scholar, who, after days of poverty such as we may read many a true history of in Walker’s “Sufferings of the Clergy,” and a sore struggle with the Plague, lived to be Rector of Whitechapel, and better still, after the crowning misfortune of the Fire, to end his days quietly among the country folk at Bucklands with his good wife by his side. Master Blower is indeed drawn with Miss Manning’s happiest touches: we do not readily forget the figure he presents in bed, or how he “in his Deliration went through the whole Book of Job in his head.”
Whether most lads would not fall in love with Violet we cannot tell, but certainly quiet Cherry is a good woman, worthy of the hand of Mary Wilkins. We may sometimes feel that she is a damsel of the nineteenth century at masquerade in the dress of two centuries before; but we like her none the less if we fancy she is good Miss Manning in disguise.
And so we leave her and Master Blower happy in their home at Bucklands. Good man, we doubt not he tilled his garden and tended his parish well, like the Berkshire priest and poet of to-day, and, it may be, with the same thought.
“In all my borders I my true love seek
By flowery signs to set:
Praising the rose-carnation for her cheek,
Her hair the violet;