Uncertain whether to advance or retreat I took a few tentative steps, which brought me to the bust of our own Longfellow. The dignified and old-school New Englander is here represented as a plump-faced and jovial gentleman with very curly hair. The marble is excessively white and new-looking, and altogether the monument suggests the Longfellow who wrote “There was a little girl, who had a little curl,” rather than the author of Evangeline. But if not of poetic effect, the bust is satisfactory as a fine type of American manhood, so I smiled back at it, and passed on.
Then, by chance, I turned into the South Transept.
It was about five o’clock on a midsummer afternoon, the hour, as I have often since proved, when the spell of the Poets’ Corner is most potent—the hour when a prismatic shaft of sunlight strikes exactly on the marble forehead of Burns, and flickering sun-rays light up the face of Southey. There, above the mortal remains of Henry Irving, I stood, and as I looked up, I knew that at last Westminster Abbey and I were at one.
For I saw Shakespeare.
It was not the emotional atmosphere of the place, for that had not as yet affected me. It was not historic association, for I knew Shakespeare’s bones did not rest there. It was not the inherent, artistic worth of the sculptured figure, for I knew that it has never been looked upon as a masterpiece, and that Walpole, or somebody, called it “preposterous.” But it was Shakespeare, and from his eyes there shone all the wonder, the beauty, and the immortality of his genius.
I am told the whole monument is wrong in composition and in execution, but that is merely
A fault to pardon in the drawing’s lines,—
Its body, so to speak; its soul is right.
Or at least it was to me, and from that moment I felt at home in Westminster Abbey.
Without leaving the United States, I could have found a more magnificent statue of Shakespeare in our own Library of Congress, but no other representation of him, in paint or stone, has ever portrayed to my mind the personality of the poet as does the Abbey monument.