"Ye leaning palms, that seem to look
Pleased o'er your image in the brook."
That Shakespeare included the willow in his forest scenery is certain, from another passage in the same play:--
"West of this place, down in the neighbour bottom.
The rank of osiers by the murmuring stream,
Left on your right hand brings you to the place."
The customs and amusements of Northamptonshire, which are frequently noticed in these volumes, were identical with those of the neighbouring county of Warwick, and, in like manner illustrate very clearly many passages in the great dramatist.--Miss Baker's "Glossary of Northamptonshire Words." (Quoted by the London Athenaeum.)
[[037]] Mrs. Hemans once took up her abode for some weeks with Wordsworth at Rydal Mount, and was so charmed with the country around, that she was induced to take a cottage called Dove's Nest, which over-looked the lake of Windermere. But tourists and idlers so haunted her retreat and so worried her for autographs and Album contributions, that she was obliged to make her escape. Her little cottage and garden in the village of Wavertree, near Liverpool, seem to have met the fate which has befallen so many of the residences of the poets. "Mrs. Hemans's little flower-garden" (says a late visitor) "was no more--but rank grass and weeds sprang up luxuriously; many of the windows were broken; the entrance gate was off its hinges: the vine in front of the house trailed along the ground, and a board, with 'This house to let' upon it, was nailed on the door. I entered the deserted garden and looked into the little parlour--once so full of taste and elegance; it was gloomy and cheerless. The paper was spotted with damp, and spiders had built their webs in the corner. As I mused on the uncertainty of human life, I exclaimed with the eloquent Burke,--'What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!'"
The beautiful grounds of the late Professor Wilson at Elleray, we are told by Mr. Howitt in his interesting "Homes and Haunts of the British Poets" have also been sadly changed. "Steam," he says, "as little as time, has respected the sanctity of the poet's home, but has drawn its roaring iron steeds opposite to its gate and has menaced to rush through it and lay waste its charmed solitude. In plain words, I saw the stages of a projected railway running in an ominous line across the very lawn and before the windows of Elleray." I believe the whole place has been purchased by a Railway Company.
[[038]] In Churton's Rail Book of England, published about three years ago, Pope's Villa is thus noticed--"Not only was this temple of the Muses--this abode of genius--the resort of the learned and the wittiest of the land--levelled to the earth, but all that the earth produced to remind posterity of its illustrious owner, and identify the dead with the living strains he has bequeathed to us, was plucked up by the roots and scattered to the wind." On the authority of William Hewitt I have stated on an [earlier page] that some splendid Spanish chesnut trees and some elms and cedars planted by Pope at Twickenham were still in existence. But Churton is a later authority. Howitt's book was published in 1847.
[[039]] One would have thought &c. See the garden of Armida, as described by Tasso, C. xvi. 9, &c.
"In lieto aspetto il bel giardin s'aperse &c."
Here was all that variety, which constitutes the nature of beauty: hill and dale, lawns and crystal rivers, &c.