Ye Old Church Stile House, Cobham, A.D. 1432, restored 1635.
"Ye Old Church Stile House, Cobham, 1432, restored 1635," is the engaging legend painted on a low-roofed timbered house which stands at the churchyard gate. With its square beams, its latticed windows and red curtains, it is a model of what a "Home of Rest for Gentlewomen"—which is its vocation—should be. Cobham has one or two other good houses, Georgian, red and solid, but the best perhaps is the old White Lion posting inn at Cobham Street, half a mile away on the Portsmouth Road. The White Lion stood by the fourth tollhouse on the highway from London, and its oak-panelled parlours have entertained travellers for four centuries or more—none thirstier, perhaps, than "Liberty" Wilkes, who passed that way on a day in 1794, and drank "a large bowl of lemonade."
Pain's Hill, which rises above the Mole a little further on the road, is a name associated with a gardener and a poet. The gardener was Charles Hamilton, who burdened his lawns with such an astonishing variety of temples, chapels, grottos, castles, cascades and ruins—including a hermitage with a real live hermit—that the result was voted one of the greatest achievements in landscape gardening of the Georgian or any other age. The hermit, sad to relate, was a failure. He was offered £700 to live a Nebuchadnezzar-like existence in his cell, sleeping on a mat, never speaking a word, and abandoning all the conveniences of a toilet. He would gladly have taken the £700, but threw up his post after three weeks.
The poet was Matthew Arnold, who spent most of the last fifteen years of his life at Pain's Hill Cottage. He wrote little poetry there; he came to Pain's Hill in the year after he had published Literature and Dogma, when his mind was occupied with his revolution against the sombreness and narrowness of modern English religious thought. But to Pain's Hill, I think, belong "Geist's Grave" and "Kaiser Dead" and "Poor Matthias;" "Geist's Grave" written for his little son, and "Poor Matthias" for his daughter, perhaps—Matthias, bought at Hastings to please a child, though she, childlike, would have chosen a bigger bird:—
"Behold
French canary-merchant old
Shepherding his flock of gold
In a low dim-lighted pen
Scann'd of tramps and fishermen!
There a bird, high-coloured, fat,
Proud of port, though something squat—
Pursy, play'd-out Philistine—
Dazzled Nelly's youthful eyne.
But, far in, obscure, there stirr'd
On his perch a sprightlier bird,
Courteous-eyed, erect and slim;
And I whisper'd: 'Fix on him!'
Home we brought him, young and fair,
Songs to trill in Surrey air.
Here Matthias sang his fill,
Saw the cedars of Pain's Hill;
Here he pour'd his little soul,
Heard the murmur of the Mole."
And it was while Matthew Arnold was living at Pain's Hill that he chose out his little collection of "selected poems." I like to think of him reading over his work in his Surrey garden, and answering once more the cuckoo calling "from the wet field, through the vext garden-trees"—
"Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?
Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,
Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,
Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,
Sweet William with his homely cottage smell,
And stocks in fragrant blow:
Roses that down the alleys shine afar,
And open, jasmined-muffled lattices,
And groups under the dreaming garden trees,
And the full moon, and the white evening star."
Bridge over the Mole, Cobham.