Steele, Gay, Arbuthnot, and the rest, who, as we know, had slipped out of the daylight of the sweet landscape, years and years before, but now
‘Revisiting the glimpses of the moon,’
with nothing earthly about them but the still clinging likeness of their old humanity. No one will ever more dream dreams or see visions under the Nine Elms, that made such a charming landmark from the East Heath, and of which it was locally said that when they fell Windsor Castle would fall also. This prophecy was, of course, attributed to Mother Shipton, whose power to prophesy had ceased long before the Nine Elms were planted, and which, I cannot help thinking, had its origin in a transverse reading of two lines of Edward Coxe’s poem, ‘To Commemorate the Preservation of the Nine Elms on Hampstead Heath’:
‘While yonder castle towers sublime
These elms shall brave the threats of time.’
In the years I am writing of, the Heath possessed more natural beauty than at present; then the grove of pine-trees opposite the old citizen’s house who had reared and planted them looked much as it looked when Constable painted it, or as it appeared in Blake’s illustration of Dante, which gave these trees (amongst the artist’s friends) the name of ‘the Dante Wood.’ Twenty years farther on in my remembrance of them, time and winter storms had thinned their boughs, and bared them of their foliage (if one can apply this phrase to their needle-shaped leaves); moreover, the sand and gravel diggers had excavated under and between their roots, leaving them bare, and with scarcely any hold upon the earth, an easy prey to the first hurricane.
Judge’s Walk.
But the contrast of the tall, orange-brown trunks with the dusky green, jagged and stretched-out branches made them picturesque objects; and seeing how well they once flourished on that windy eminence, and the proofs some of the best artists have given of the eminently pictorial effect of these trees, let us hope that the conservators of the Heath may be induced to plant others.
In those far-off days the Judge’s Walk, though greatly despoiled of its primal beauty, retained sufficient of it to show what a handsome double grove this triple row of elms, magnificent in height and form in the amplitude of spreading boughs and summer foliage, must have made. A friend of mine possessed a very fine lithographed drawing of the walk when at the apparent acme of its perfection, the recollection of which makes one grieve at its present almost hopeless decadence, the trees pollarded and lopped out of all resemblance of their old forms, and more than three parts of their number dead.