“At Chippenham, as I passed the park at Harnish, I went back farther still to three years and a half of private school imprisonment and the pettiest of petty miseries. They do not matter much now certainly, but one does grudge six years of youth denuded of all that makes life pleasant and beautiful.
“Charlton is a magnificent old house of yellow-grey stone, Jacobean, open on all sides, a perfect quadrangle. Inside, there was once a courtyard, but a former Lord Suffolk closed it in. It remained for many years a mere gravelled space: lately Lady Suffolk has had it paved, and to a certain extent furnished. The rooms are handsome in stucco ornaments, but not picturesque. The pictures are glorious. There is one of the noblest known works of Leonardo da Vinci—‘La Vierge aux Rochers,’ the figures all with the peculiar Leonardo type of face, grouped in a rocky valley—strange, wild, and fantastic.[202] The picture which to me is most charming is ‘Le Raboteur,’ attributed to Annibale Carracci. The Virgin, a sweet-looking peasant woman, yet with an expression of ‘pondering these things in her heart,’ is sitting outside her cottage door with her work-basket by her side. The boy Jesus, in a simple blue tunic, is standing at the end of the carpenter’s table—‘subject to his parents’—doing some measuring for old Joseph, who is at work there. It is a quiet village group such as one has often seen, only elevated by expression.
“There is a glorious old gallery with a noble ceiling, full of portraits and of old and interesting books. In the ‘rose parlour’ are more pictures, and a ceiling the design of which is repeated in the flower-garden. Many of the pictures belonged to James II. When he fled, he sent them to be taken care of by Colonel Graham, who had married the Earl of Berkshire’s daughter, and William III. afterwards allowed them to remain.”
“June 18.—Yesterday it rained at intervals all day. I drew the gallery, and enjoyed talking to Lady Suffolk,[203] who sat by me, with a charm of face and manner and mind which recalls Donne’s lines—
‘No spring or summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen on one autumnal face.’
She lives so far more in the heavenly than the earthly horizons, that one feels raised above earth whilst one is with her. She spoke of the impossibility of believing in eternity of punishment, yet of the mass of difficulties besetting all explanations. She talked of a woman in the village in failing health and unhappy. Being asked if she was not troubled in her mind, she confessed that she was, but said, ‘It is not for want of light; I have had plenty of light.’ She said her father had said to her, ‘Now if you go to hell, Hannah, it will not be for want of light.’
“Some one had urged Lady Suffolk to go and hear Moody and Sankey, because their sermons on heaven were such a refreshment and rest: she had gone, and the sermon had all been about hell.