Alresford is an excellent little town, sad-coloured but not cold, and very airy. For not only does the main street descend from this point steeply west towards Winchester, but the broad street also descends northward, so that over the tops of the houses crossing the bottom of it and over the hidden Alre, are seen the airy highlands of Abbotsstone, Swarraton, and Godsfield. The towered flint church and the churchyard make almost as much of a town as Alresford itself, so numerous are the tombs of all the Wools, Keanes, Corderoys, Privetts, Cameses, Whitears, Norgetts, Dykeses, scattered among many small yew trees. At one side stand many headstones of French officers who had served Napoleon, but died in England about the time of Waterloo—Lhuille, Lavan, Garnier, Riouffe, and Fournier. Inside the church one of the most noticeable things is a tablet to one John Lake, who was born in 1691, died in 1759, and lies near that spot, waiting for the day of judgment. “Qualis erat,” says the inscription, “dies iste indicabit:” (“What manner of man he was that day will make known.”) The writer of these words saved himself from lies and from trouble.
I looked in vain for any one bearing the name of the poet who praised Alresford pond—George Wither. Or, rather, he praised it as it was in the days when Thetis resorted thither and played there with her attendant fishes, and received crowns of flowers and beech leaves from the land nymphs at eve:—
“For pleasant was that pool, and near it then
Was neither rotten marsh nor boggy fen.
It was not overgrown with boist’rous sedge,
Nor grew there rudely then along the edge
A bending willow nor a prickly bush,
Nor broad-leaf’d flag, nor reed, nor knotty rush;
But here, well order’d, was a grove with bowers:
There grassy plots set round about with flowers.