It annoys me to think that not until the Germans vacated the gardens was this entrance fee charged. To them (as to us for generations) Kew was free; now that they have disappeared, one of the results of their provocative belligerence is that it is free no longer!
Although early yet both for flower and leaf, the daffodils were already millions strong, and would be stronger; in the rock garden the saxifrage's tender mauve clusters were to be seen, and there was a patch of the lovely Antennaria Plantagenia at its best. But the most beautiful object at the moment—and that which I went especially to see—was the Yulan, the Chinese magnolia, Magnolia conspicua, in nearly full bloom. Imagine a great tree with black boughs and twigs exquisitely disposed, from which burst ten thousand lilies of a dazzling purity. No buds, no leaves; nothing but these myriad serene white flowers springing from the hard wood. The position of the tree adds to the strangeness and beauty of it, for it is remote from anything formal, between the biggest glass-house and the edge of the arboretum. On Saturday, seen against an indigo thunderbank, it was unearthly in its luminosity.
I have to thank the rain for driving me into the Royal Palace, which, though I have known Kew for so many years, I had never entered before. In this pleasant mansion, red brick without and white panelling within, and smaller than would satisfy the requirements of any war profiteer to-day, poor old George III. passed part of the clouded evening of his long reign. The rooms retain certain of their pictures—chiefly Dutch flower and bird subjects, very gloomy and congested, and a large portrait of "Farmer George," done by the famous Miss Linwood in woolwork—and there are a few pieces of dreadful ancient furniture in one of the Queen's apartments; but otherwise they are empty.
In spite of the associations of the palace—the deranged old monarch and his stuffy Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (recollections of Fanny Burney's "Diary" and of Peter Pindar's "Lousiad" kept chasing each other through my mind)—the general feeling in it is one of cheerfulness, the result, I fancy, as much of the proportions and whiteness of the rooms as of its situation in the green sanctuary.
VII
ROYAL WINDSOR
On a Saturday in March, when the sky was of dazzling brilliance and a wind of devilish malignancy blew from the Arctic regions, I went to Windsor, in order to compare the castle as it is with the castle as Turner saw it, and to see if it is true, as a landscape expert assures me, that the heightening of the towers has ruined it. Studying the castle from various points of view, I was consistently impressed by its adequacy, its mediæval dominance, and its satisfying solidity.
Spring being so bitterly cold, I left the streets, where there is no central heating, and where I could catch no glimpse of any one in the least like Mistress Anne Page, and took refuge first in St. George's Chapel and then in the State Apartments. The chapel as a whole grows in beauty, even though new monuments interrupt its lines. The light, coming from a sky scoured by the northern breeze, was of the most lucid, so that every detail of the lovely ceiling was unusually visible, while even in the sombre choir, with its dark stalls and hanging banners and memorials of the Knights of the Garter, one could see almost distinctly. It is interesting to have as near London as this a sacred building so like those which we normally do not enter until we have crossed the Channel.