An almost saintly silence brooded there; I heard neither stir of leaf nor song of bird, nor caught I sight of any living thing to break the solitude. It was as though the monks had laid a spell of profound peace over all, a spell unbroken yet—and may it never be!
A region of repose it seems,
A place of slumber and of dreams,
Remote among the wooded hills.
The peace-bestowing silence and restful solitude of the spot will linger with me as long as my memory lasts. Great must have been the temptation, in a troublous age, to be a monk, so to escape from all the turmoil of it, and to live at peace and at ease in some such earthly paradise. Many a world-weary man to-day well might sigh for such a harbour of rest.
Truly those monks of old had an eye for pleasant places; they built "in fair grounds," as the sites of their many abbeys prove. Father Gonzague, Prior of Storrington, puts it: "Some were built in the valley by the running stream, or on the jutting hill, overhanging the river bank, like St. Agatha's and Eggleston in Yorkshire; others close on the seashore, within hearing of the perpetual cadence of the waves, like Torre, the wealthiest of the English houses in Devonshire, on a spot the charm of which is not easily surpassed, backed by hills and uplands, with just room enough on the plain for the noble church, the monastery and its outbuildings, its gardens, its fish ponds, and its mill; or again among the deep and narrow dales of Derbyshire; or the gentle swell of the Kentish hills; in the forest land of Nottinghamshire, like Welbeck; or else in remote and wild retreats, speaking of penance and detachment, like the Abbey of Magdalen's Vale at Shap, in Westmoreland." Then there are others in situations quite as romantic and as gracious: there is Tintern by the winding Wye, Bolton by the tumbling Wharfe, Fountains sheltered amongst the woods, Rievaulx amongst the hills, Llanthony lone amongst the mountains, Cleeve secluded in the "Vale of Flowers," and many another—all in well-favoured spots and tranquil ones in ancient days, and some, like Waverley, as tranquil now.
A better judge of scenery than the monk of old there could not be; where stood his abbey there was a pleasant land, well watered, overflowing with beauty, and not seldom "overflowing with milk and honey" too. If one could trust that rare romancer Time, the monks were a jovial lot—"peace to their ashes"—reaping where they had not sown, and garnering where they had not toiled; making sure of heaven above whilst also making sure of the good things of the world below, ay, and enjoying them to the full as much as any sinner. To make the best of both worlds, especially this one, that was their motto, and they lived up to it. Of the modern monks that I have seen, one half look fat and lazy, the other half lean and sour, with an aspect of piety that would not have disgraced the strictest Puritan. But I know not if one can fairly judge of the old by the new. "Tempora mutantur," and possibly monks with them, and this is all that need be said.
Of the scant abbey ruins the only portion not wholly exposed to the weather is what looks like the crypt, with its fine and delicate Early English pillars and groined roof; but it has a fireplace, and from a label attached to its walls I learned it was the "Layman's Refectory." The rest of the ruins are roofless, and it is difficult to make out, with any certainty, even the site of the church—at least I found it so. On the greensward I noticed, level with the ground surface, a stone coffin vacant and exposed to the sky, presumably discovered there and left undisturbed save for the removal of its covering; this was hollowed out to the shape of a body, with a place for the head; probably it belonged to one of the stately abbots' dust and ashes long years ago, but the interior of the stone still preserves the chisel marks of the ancient mason, as sharp almost to-day as when first made. Somehow those marks so old, yet so clear, that but for the time-stains upon them might be of recent date, bridged over the centuries and brought the past quite close to me.
Leaving the old abbey to its peaceful seclusion, we once more resumed our way and soon found ourselves at Farnham, far famed for its castle and its ancient coaching hostelry—"The Bush," to wit—and possibly also for hops and ale, but of these I am not so sure. "The Bush," says Thackeray in his Virginians, "is a famous inn which has stood in Farnham town for these three hundred years." But why I refer to this old house, in passing, is that its sign is the oldest of signs, which, in ancient days, consisted simply of a bush hung out at the end of a pole to show that wine, or ale, was sold there. Hence doubtless the saying of Shakespeare, "Good wine needs no bush."
After Farnham we struck the Winchester highway, dusty with much traffic at the time, so to escape both the traffic and the dust we took the first lane we came to—a lane that led past hop-gardens, up hill and down again; next winding round a well-wooded park it brought us to the little out-of-the-world village of Crondall, where I noticed one or two quaint half-timber houses of sufficient charm to cause me to stop and sketch them. Then after a short stretch of tree-bordered road we arrived at Odiham, a sleepy, sunny, wide-streeted town to which "no noisy railway speeds"; perhaps because of this it retains unhurt so much of its past-time naturalness. On a previous journey we had driven through Odiham, without however stopping, even though it pleased us, but we reached it by a different way. There is often a great deal in the first impression of a place, and this frequently depends upon how you approach it. No doubt there is a certain charm in the first view of fresh places, when such places possess the power to please and present themselves under favourable aspects, but it is wisdom not to linger in them overlong lest the eye should discover imperfections, so their poetry lose much of its glamour, or wholly vanish like a dream that has passed.
Before, when at Odiham, the "George" inn there, facing the roadway with its cheerful front and projecting sign, attracted my attention: a typical old coaching hostelry that looks as though it had seen more prosperous days, yet it had not retired from business but kept open wide its doors, bravely facing changed circumstances. "Posting House" in letters large is still boldly displayed on its front, but its posting is done to-day by the landlord's motor-car! Paterson's Roads, the Bradshaw of our ancestors, mentions the "George" as the inn of the place, and nearly every old roadside inn one comes across still retains the very title given to it in that rare eighteenth and early nineteenth-century road-book, according to which of its many editions one consults.