Round Frederick's Brows their Crowns let Dryads wreath,
Hence taught to grasp at Dangers, Wounds, and Death.
This was a language not only praised by Swift as well as by later critics, but then commonly understood, though there is no proof that it was ever spoken. It is fairly certain that an anonymous poet of 1708 represented some inner truth and vision, now alas! irrecoverable, by the words in his "Windsor Castle":
Beneath this Palace flows fair Thames's Streams,
Where spreading Elms shade from the Sun's hot Beams;
Where beauteous Sea-Nymphs on the Waters sport,
And bulky Tritons grace the splendid Court.
For him Queen Anne was like the sun, and he believed that:
Clouds with mourning Sables deck'd the Skies,
Till Anna like another Sun did rise.
If we take "Queen Anne" as being the equivalent of "Sun", it may still be possible to make out the cipher which he and Pope used so mysteriously.
These are not the only great men connected with Windsor and the neighbourhood in the days of its transformation. Cowley, the eagle Cowley, came to the Porch House at Chertsey for his last years, and died there in 1667. Colley Cibber, the famous Laureate, was drawn into the charmed land at Hill House, White Waltham. Later came Thomson to Richmond. Beaconsfield was the home and burial place of Burke, where Johnson and Mirabeau talked with him. At St. Anne's Hill, near Chertsey, Charles James Fox, that lover of nightingales, lived for five years at the end of his life. It was to Dropmore, and its library and gardens, that Lord Grenville retired for his last twenty years. And at Marlow Shelley moored his boat to write Laon and Cythna; at Bishopsgate he wrote Alastor; but for a romantic poet to come within a few miles of Windsor, even though he was once an Etonian, was a rash if not a sacrilegious act, and it is out of the picture. For this country is the creation of the ages of Denham and Pope and George the Fourth, who probably did not read Shelley. The plantation of the two miles of elms in the Long Walk was begun under Charles II in 1680, and these are far more impressive than the oaks at Swinley, which remind the imaginative of Alfred and the Confessor. The straight lines of this Walk and of Queen Anne's ride dominate the Park. At Cranbourne the significant fact is not that William the Conqueror's Oak is in the White Deer Enclosure, but that the racehorse "Eclipse" was born here in 1764. The Bray Wood oak trees that sprouted in the Middle Ages were suddenly modernized by being named after Queen Anne and Queen Charlotte.
THE LOWER WARD, WINDSOR CASTLE
When Hazlitt went to see the pictures at Windsor, he said: "Pope's lines on Windsor Forest suggest themselves to the mind and make the air about it delicate". It looks a little odd to attribute to such a poem the effect of making the air delicate—Banquo having observed to Duncan that where the martlets "most breed and haunt ... the air is delicate". Yet it has a truth. The delicacy is sophisticated; it is the delicacy of three—not to say nine—centuries of artifice, or of Nature hand in hand with Sir Christopher Wren, Grinling Gibbons, Antonio Verrio, Alexander Pope, Esquire, and the great gardeners. This artifice is triumphant on the East Terrace of the Castle itself, the smooth walk half a mile long, the orangery, the dark and bright symmetrical Italian garden, with its marble and bronze statuary and its elephants and nymphs, seen from the white-and-gold royal dining-room. It is strong on the smooth sculptured turf below the Round Tower and the rose garden in the ditch, though quaintly alleviated by the gorse above that; still strong in the avenues of great elms in the Home Park, the lime trees, the grass, as smooth as a lake and untrodden save by birds, under the Castle hill and the high rookery trees. If you escape it among the bracken and the warty oaks of the Great Park, it is suddenly upon you with violence when you look up at Snow Hill and see the colossal copper statue of Farmer George on horseback, more magnificent and less amiable now than in life. It is more than perfect—it is rampant and even, so far as is consistent with its formality, rollicking—at Virginia Water, the largest artificial water in England, completed under George III, with its laced waterfall, its ruined columns brought from Tripoli by George IV, its marble altar dedicated to Jupiter Helios; the dark yews, close by, and the cedars and stone pines of Belvidere Wood; the heronry, and the Fishing Cottage which imperfectly replaces a Fishing Temple in the Chinese style. If Pope's "Windsor Forest" has become obscure in the night of two hundred years, Virginia Water speaks in an unquestionable and still flourishing style.