"The painted birds, companions of the Spring,
Hopping from spray to spray were heard to sing.
Both eyes and ears received a like delight,
Enchanting music, and a charming sight.
On Philomel I fixed my whole desire,
And listened for the queen of all the quire.
Fain would I hear her heavenly voice to sing,
And wanted yet an omen to the Spring.
* * * * *
So sweet, so shrill, so variously she sung
That the grove echoed, and the valleys rung."
It must remain a problem to discover why such verse should be associated with the singing of nightingales. Perhaps the nightingales dislike the association; at all events, I am told that they have deserted St. Anne's Hill. If they have, it is a strange conclusion to the years of close protection which a former owner of St. Anne's Hill extended to her birds. The late Lady Holland would never have a singing bird killed nor a nest touched in all her grounds, and if one of them was found dead in any of the shrubberies, her orders were that it was to be given a prompt and respectable burial. Jays and magpies, however, she could not abide, nor crows and rooks, and a curious story is told of a rookery which these birds tried to establish near the house. Every year they decided to build in a particular tree, and every year they were shot or otherwise driven away. At last Lady Holland died, and the gardeners gladly laid aside their guns. The very next spring the rookery was firmly established, and has cawed its pæans ever since.
A Byway near Weybridge.
CHAPTER XVII
WEYBRIDGE
A Georgian village.—The Kembles.—A prophetic lament.—Wey no more.—The Brooklands bucket.—Exiles.—Riddles of spelling.—A royal palace.—The Duchess's Monkeys.—Oatlands cedars.—Portmore Park.—St. George's Hill.—The Leveller's Beanfields.
There is a pleasant melancholy in trying to imagine a Georgian Weybridge. Fanny Kemble describes the village as she saw it as a girl, before the railway came. Then, in the twenties, it was "a rural, rather deserted-looking, and most picturesque village, with the desolate domain of Portmore Park, its mansion falling to ruin, on one side of it, and on the other the empty house and fine park of Oatlands, the former residence of the Duke of York." Eighty years have gone, and the deserted-looking village has spread into a town and suburbs covering more than a square mile of ground; Portmore Park has vanished; Oatlands is a hotel. The railway has created one more residential neighbourhood.