To meet the printer’s dev’let face to face.’[125]
In his time the house was simply paled in, and had a fair lawn before it, surrounded by picturesque trees and shrubs. A man of fine taste, but of a violent and uncertain disposition, George Steevens lived in retirement at Hampstead for nearly thirty years (twenty-one of them in this house), ‘excluding all local acquaintance.’ He is said to have expended £2,000 in improving and beautifying the house and grounds. He died here in 1800, aged sixty-two, and was buried in the chapel at Poplar, in which parish he was born, being the son of a sea-captain in the service of the East India Company, subsequently a director. A monument by Flaxman and an epitaph by Hayley distinguish his tomb.[126]
In 1812, when John Carey published the fifth edition of his ‘New Itinerary, or Book of the Roads,’ this house was in the possession of Thomas Sheppard, Esq., M.P. for Frome,[127] who retained it till 1845, when it passed into other hands. At this present writing it is the property of Mrs. Lister. Immediately opposite is the green mound and ornamental shrubbery of the New Reservoir, and at the end of the wall, continued from the house, and enclosing the once busy stable-yard and offices of the Upper Flask, a path runs into the Holford Road, by Heathfield House, and so to the East Heath.
On the opposite side of the road is the Whitestone Pond, and here the visitor finds himself
‘High on bleak Hampstead’s swarthy moor,’
as Macaulay has it, a line all very well for poetical purposes, but by no means characteristic of Hampstead Heath, with its pure, etherized air, full of brightness on the least pretence of sunshine, and though bleak enough at this eminence with the wind at N.N.E., even balmy then in some one or other of its many walks and sheltered valleys. It is true that Gilchrist in his ‘Life of Blake’ speaks of the depth and monotony of the tints prevailing in the woods and fields about Hampstead. But Collins and Constable, Linnell, Leslie, and Landseer, and a host of later artists, have not found them so. To them the Heath, with its broken ground, varied herbage, and picturesque trees or groups of them, its splendid cloudscapes, its changeful lights and shadows, has proved an art school full of infinite variety and inexhaustible beauty. Here Collins came for his old trees, his undulating banks, ‘full of flowering grasses, and dark dock leaves,’ and the light and shade and reflections that delight us in his pictures. Here, too, he met his ‘Harvest Showers’ and ‘Blackberry-Gatherers,’ and just across the Heath, where we are going, is the scene of his ‘Taking out a Thorn’ (this picture is in the possession of Her Majesty). And Constable, he who never saw an ugly thing in his life, ‘for light and shade and perspective will make it beautiful,’[128] he, too, found by every hedge and in every lane treasures of form and tint, which Nature scatters broadcast, and therefore, to use his own words, ‘nobody thinks it worth while to pick them up’—we suppose because the miracle is too common to be generally noticed. Here he also studied the skies, and effects of light, shade and colour, the dews, the breeze, the storm, and made many a pictorial transcript from the vantage-ground of the Heath, now bright with sunshine, but more often under the aspect of drifting showers, for he seems to have loved the rain-laden, cloudy skies, and to have revelled in depicting them. Fuseli, when going to call on the artist, would cry out, ‘Give me an umbrella; I am going to see Constable’s pictures!’[129]
It was delightful to Constable, as it was to Collins, to point out the beauty of the scene (than which there are few more lovely spots in England), and to do, as it were, the honours of the Heath to friends and visitors less intimate with it than himself—to surprise them with new effects, and hear the praise of his ‘sweet Hampstead,’ repeated at every fresh point of view. Such sympathetic appreciation doubled his own pleasure in the prospects. We can imagine him and the brothers Chalon, who in the delicious weather of the summer of 1834-35 spent six weeks at Hampstead, standing here,[130] near the Flagstaff, from whence on a clear day one may see the towers of Windsor, on the one hand, and across the Thames to Shooter’s Hill and Hanging Woods on the other; while to the south-west rises the spire-crowned hill of Harrow, with all the broad lands lying between. Blake, too, though he could not relish the brisk air of the Upper Heath, must in his visits to Linnell’s have met with visions on its summit. It may have been here that he saw
‘The moon like a flower
In heaven’s high bower
With silent delight