WE had “Queen’s weather” for most of our excursions in England, and no fairer day than that on which we went to Stratford-on-Avon.
The denizens of the region give the first sound of a to the name of the quiet river—as in fate. I do not undertake to decide whether they, or we are correct. Their derelictions upon the H question are so flagrant as to breed distrust of all their inventions and practice in pronunciation. (Although we did learn to say “Tems”—very short—for “T’ames.”)
I wish, for the benefit of future tourists who may read these pages, that I had retained the address of the driver—and I believe the owner—of the waggonette we secured for our drives in Warwickshire. It held our party of six comfortably, leaving abundant space in the bottom and under the seats for hamper and wraps, and was a stylish, easy-running vehicle. The coachman was a fine young fellow of, perhaps, six-and-twenty, civil, obliging, and, in our experience, an exceptionally intelligent member of his class. In this conveyance, and with such pilotage, we set out on July 27th, upon one of our red-letter pilgrimages—fore-ordained within our, for once, prophetic souls ever since, as ten-year old children, we used to read Shakspeare secretly in the garret on rainy Saturdays.
It was an old copy relegated to the lumber-chest as too shabby for the family library. One side of the calf-skin cover was gone, and luckily for the morals of the juvenile student, “Venus and Adonis” and most of the sonnets had followed suite. But an engraved head of William Shakspeare was protected by the remaining cover and had left a shadow-picture, in white-and-yellow, upon the tissue-paper next it. After the title-page followed a dozen or so of biography, which we devoured as eagerly as we did “The Tempest,” “Julius Cæsar,” and “Macbeth.” We had read Mrs. Whitney’s always-and-everywhere charming “Sights and Insights,” before and since leaving America, and worn Emory Ann’s “realizing our geography” to shreds by much quoting. To-day, we were realizing our Shakspeare and “Merry” England.
The drive was surpassingly lovely. The smoothness of the road was, in itself, a luxury. It is as evenly-graded and free from stones and ruts as a bowling-alley. One prolific topic of conversation is denied the morning-callers and bashful swains of Warwickshire. They cannot discuss the “state of the roads,” their uniform condition being above criticism. The grass grew quite up to the edge of the highway, but was shaven and weedless as a lawn. There were hedge-rows instead of fences, and at intervals, we had enchanting glimpses up intersecting ways of what we had heard and read of all our lives, yet in which we scarcely believed until we saw, in their beauty and picturesqueness, real lanes. The banks, sloping downward from the hedges into these, were clothed with vines, ferns and field-flowers. One appreciates the exquisite fidelity of such sketches from Nature as,—
“I know a bank on which the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows
Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine—”