Passages from the English Notebooks, Complete

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

We had an old description of the place with us, aided by which we traced out the principal part of the edifice, such as the church, as already mentioned, and, contiguous to this, the Chapter-house, which is better preserved than the church; also the kitchen, and the room where the monks met to talk; and the range of wall, where their cells probably were. I never before had given myself the trouble to form any distinct idea of what an abbey or monastery was,—a place where holy rites were daily and continually to be performed, with places to eat and sleep contiguous and convenient, in order that the monks might always be at hand to perform those rites. They lived only to worship, and therefore lived under the same roof with their place of worship, which, of course, was the principal object in the edifice, and hallowed the whole of it. We found, too, at one end of the ruins, what is supposed to have been a school-house for the children of the tenantry or villeins of the abbey. All round this room is a bench of stone against the wall, and the pedestal also of the master's seat. There are, likewise, the ruins of the mill; and the mill-stream, which is just as new as ever it was, still goes murmuring and babbling, and passes under two or three old bridges, consisting of a low gray arch overgrown with grass and shrubbery. That stream was the most fleeting and vanishing thing about the ponderous and high-piled abbey; and yet it has outlasted everything else, and might still outlast another such edifice, and be none the worse for wear.

There is not a great deal of ivy upon the walls, and though an ivied wall is a beautiful object, yet it is better not to have too much,—else it is but one wall of unbroken verdure, on which you can see none of the sculptural ornaments, nor any of the hieroglyphics of Time. A sweep of ivy here and there, with the gray wall everywhere showing through, makes the better picture; and I think that nothing is so effective as the little bunches of flowers, a mere handful, that grow in spots where the seeds have been carried by the wind ages ago.

I have made a miserable botch of this description; it is no description, but merely an attempt to preserve something of the impression it made on me, and in this I do not seem to have succeeded at all. I liked the contrast between the sombreness of the old walls, and the sunshine falling through them, and gladdening the grass that floored the aisles; also, I liked the effect of so many idle and cheerful people, strolling into the haunts of the dead monks, and going babbling about, and peering into the dark nooks; and listening to catch some idea of what the building was from a clerical-looking personage, who was explaining it to a party of his friends. I don't know how well acquainted this gentleman might be with the subject; but he seemed anxious not to impart his knowledge too extensively, and gave a pretty direct rebuff to an honest man who ventured an inquiry of him. I think that the railway, and the hotel within the abbey grounds, add to the charm of the place. A moonlight solitary visit might be very good, too, in its way; but I believe that one great charm and beauty of antiquity is, that we view it out of the midst of quite another mode of life; and the more perfectly this can be done, the better. It can never be done more perfectly than at Furness Abbey, which is in itself a very sombre scene, and stands, moreover, in the midst of a melancholy valley, the Saxon name of which means the Vale of the Deadly Nightshade.

The entrance to the stable-yard of the hotel is beneath a pointed arch of Saxon architecture, and on one side of this stands an old building, looking like a chapel, but which may have been a porter's lodge. The Abbot's residence was in this quarter; and the clerical personage, before alluded to, spoke of these as the oldest part of the ruins.

About half a mile on the hither side of the abbey stands the village of Dalton, in which is a castle built on a Roman foundation, and which was afterwards used by the abbots (in their capacity of feudal lords) as a prison. The abbey was founded about 1027 by King Stephen, before he came to the throne; and the faces of himself and of his queen are still to be seen on one of the walls.

We had a very agreeable drive home (our drive hither had been uncomfortably sunny and hot), and we stopped at Ulverton to buy a pair of shoes for J——- and some drawing-books and stationery. As we passed through the little town in the morning, it was all alive with the bustle and throng of the weekly market; and though this had ceased on our return, the streets still looked animated, because the heat of the day drew most of the population, I should imagine, out of doors. Old men look very antiquated here in their old-fashioned coats and breeches, sunning themselves by the wayside.

We reached home somewhere about eight o'clock,—home I see I have called it; and it seems as homelike a spot as any we have found in England,—the old inn, close by the bridge, beside the clear river, pleasantly overshadowed by trees. It is entirely English, and like nothing that one sees in America; and yet. I feel as if I might have lived here a long while ago, and had now come back because I retained pleasant recollections of it. The children, too, make themselves at home. J——- spends his time from morning to night fishing for minnows or trout, and catching nothing at all, and U—— and R——- have been riding between fields and barn in a hay-cart. The roads give us beautiful walks along the river-side, or wind away among the gentle hills; and if we had nothing else to look at in these walks, the hedges and stone fences would afford interest enough, so many and pretty are the flowers, roses, honeysuckles, and other sweet things, and so abundantly does the moss and ivy grow among the old stones of the fences, which would never have a single shoot of vegetation on them in America till the very end of time. But here, no sooner is a stone fence built, than Nature sets to work to make it a part of herself. She adopts it and adorns it, as if it were her own child. A little sprig of ivy may be seen creeping up the side, and clinging fast with its many feet; a tuft of grass roots itself between two of the stones, where a little dust from the road has been moistened into soil for it: a small bunch of fern grows in another such crevice; a deep, soft, green moss spreads itself over the top and all along the sides of the fence; and wherever nothing else will grow, lichens adhere to the stones and variegate their lines. Finally, a great deal of shrubbery is sure to cluster along its extent, and take away all hardness from the outline; and so the whole stone fence looks as if God had had at least as much to do with it as man. The trunks of the trees, too, exhibit a similar parasitical vegetation. Parasitical is an unkind phrase to bestow on this beautiful love and kindness which seems to exist here between one plant and another; the strong thing—being always ready to give support and sustenance, and the weak thing to repay with beauty, so that both are the richer,—as in the case of ivy and woodbine, clustering up the trunk of a tall tree, and adding Corinthian grace to its lofty beauty.

Mr. W———, our landlord, has lent us a splendid work with engravings, illustrating the antiquities of Furness Abbey. I gather from it that the hotel must have been rebuilt or repaired from an old manor-house, which was itself erected by a family of Prestons, after the Reformation, and was a renewal from the Abbot's residence. Much of the edifice probably, as it exists now, may have been part of the original one; and there are bas-reliefs of Scripture subjects, sculptured in stone, and fixed in the wall of the dining-room, which have been there since the Abbot's time. This author thinks that what we had supposed to be the school-house (on the authority of an old book) was really the building for the reception of guests, with its chapel. He says that the tall arches in the church are sixty feet high. The Earl of Burlington, I believe, is the present proprietor of the abbey.

THE LAKES.

July 16th.—On Saturday, we left Newby Bridge, and came by steamboat up Windermere Lake to Lowwood Hotel, where we now are. The foot of the lake is just above Newby Bridge, and it widens from that point, but never to such a breadth that objects are not pretty distinctly visible from shore to shore. The steamer stops at two or three places in the course of its voyage, the principal one being Bowness, which has a little bustle and air of business about it proper to the principal port of the lake. There are several small yachts, and many skiffs rowing about. The banks are everywhere beautiful, and the water, in one portion, is strewn with islands; few of which are large enough to be inhabitable, but they all seem to be appropriated, and kept in the neatest order. As yet, I have seen no wildness; everything is perfectly subdued and polished and imbued with human taste, except, indeed, the outlines of the hills, which continue very much the same as God made them. As we approached the head of the lake, the congregation of great hills in the distance became very striking. The shapes of these English mountains are certainly far more picturesque than those which I have seen in Eastern America, where their summits are almost invariably rounded, as I remember them. They are great hillocks, great bunches of earth, similar to one another in their developments. Here they have variety of shape, rising into peaks, falling in abrupt precipices, stretching along in zigzag outlines, and thus making the most of their not very gigantic masses, and producing a remarkable effect.