Two hours after I was listening to the overture of La Cenerentola, and watching the entrance, to the opera, of the gay, the celebrated, and the noble. In the house I had left, night had brought with it (as it does always to the insane) a maddening and terrific exaltation of brain and spirit—but how different from that exaltation of brain and spirit sought at the same hour by creatures of the same human family, at the opera! It was difficult not to wonder at the distribution of allotments to mankind. In a box on the left of me sat the Queen, keeping time with a fan to the delicious singing of Pauline Garcia, her favorite minister standing behind her chair, and her maids of honor around—herself the smiling, youthful, and admired Sovereign of the most powerful nation on earth! I thought of the poor girl in her miserable cell at Bedlam imploring release.
The Queen’s face has thinned and grown more oval since I saw her at a drawing-room four years ago, as Princess Victoria. She has been compelled to think since then, and such exigencies, in all stations of life, work out the expression of the face. She has now what I should pronounce a decidedly intellectual countenance, a little petulant withal when she turns to speak, but on the whole quite beautiful enough for a virgin queen. No particular attention seemed paid to her by the audience. She was dressed less gayly than many others around her. Her box was at the left side of the house undistinguished by any mark of royalty, and a stranger would never have suspected her presence.
Pauline Garcia sang better than I thought it possible for any one to sing after Malibran was dead. She has her sister’s look about the forehead and eyes, and all her sister’s soul and passionateness in her style of singing. Her face is otherwise very plain, but, plain as it is, the opera-going public prefer her already to the beautiful and more powerful Grisi. The latter long triumphant prima donna is said to be very unhappy at her eclipse by this new favorite; and it is curious enough to hear the hundred and one faults found in the declining songstress by those who once would not admit that she could be transcended on earth. A very celebrated person, whom I remembered, when in London before, giving Grisi the most unqualified eulogy, assured the gay admirers in her box last night that she had always said that Grisi had nothing but lungs and fine eyes. She was a great healthy Italian girl, and could sing in tune; but soul or sentiment she never had! Poor Grisi! Hers is the lot of all who are so unhappy as to have been much admired. “Le monde ne hait rien autant que ses idoles quand ils sont à terre,” said the wise La Bruyere.
Some of the most delightful events in one’s travels are those which afford the least matériel for description, and such is our séjour of a few days at the vicarage of B——. It was a venerable old house with pointed gables, elaborate and pointed windows, with panes of glass of the size of the palm of the hand, low doors, narrow staircases, all sorts of unsuspected rooms and creepers outside, trellised and trained to every corner and angle. Then there was the modern wing, with library and dining room, large windows, marble fireplaces, and French paper; and in going from your bedroom to breakfast you might fancy yourself stepping from Queen Elizabeth’s time to Queen Victoria’s. A high hedge of holly divided the smoothly-shaven lawn from the church-yard, and in the midst of the moss-grown headstones stood a gray old church with four venerable towers, one of the most picturesque and beautiful specimens of the old English architecture that I have ever seen. The whole group, church, vicarage, and a small hamlet of vine covered and embowered stone cottages, lay in the lap of a gently rising sweep of hills, and all around were spread landscapes of the finished and serene character peculiar to England—rich fields framed in flowering hedges, clumps of forest trees, glimpses of distant parks, country seats, and village spires, and on the horizon a line of mist-clad hills, scarce ever more distinct than the banks of low-lying clouds retiring after a thunder storm in America.
Early on Sunday morning we were awakened by the melody of the bells in the old towers; and with brief pauses between the tunes, they were played upon most musically, till the hour for the morning services. We have little idea in America of the perfection to which the chiming of bells is carried in England. In the towers of this small rural church are hung eight bells of different tone, and the tunes played on them by the more accomplished ringers of the neighboring hamlet are varied endlessly. I lay and listened to the simple airs as they died away over the valley, with a pleasure I can scarcely express. The morning was serene and bright, the perfume of the clematis and jasmine flowers at the window penetrated to the curtains of my bed, and Sunday seemed to have dawned with the audible worship and palpable incense of nature. We were told at breakfast that the chimes had been unusually merry, and were a compliment to ourselves, the villagers always expressing thus their congratulations on the arrival of guests at the vicarage. The compliment was repeated between services, and a very long peal rang in the twilight—our near relationship to the vicar’s family authorizing a very special rejoicing.
The interior of the church was very ancient looking and rough, the pews of unpainted oak, and the massive stone walls simply whitewashed. The congregation was small, perhaps fifty persons, and the men were (with two exceptions) dressed in russet carters’ frocks, and most of them in leather leggins. The children sat on low benches placed in the centre of the one aisle, and the boys, like their fathers, were in smock frocks of homespun, their heavy shoes shod with iron like horses’ hoofs, and their little legs buttoned up in the impenetrable gaiters of coarse leather. They looked, men and boys, as if they were intended to wear but one suit in this world.
I was struck with the solemnity of the service, and the decorous attention of men, women, and children, to the responses. It was a beautiful specimen of simple and pastoral worship. Each family had the name of their farm or place of residence printed on the back of the pew, with the number of seats to which they were entitled, probably in proportion to their tithes. The “living” is worth, if I remember right, not much over a hundred pounds—an insufficient sum to support so luxurious a vicarage as is appended to it; but, happily for the people, the vicar chances to be a man of fortune, and he unites in his excellent character the exemplary pastor with the physician and lord of the manor. I left B—— with the conviction that if peace, contentment, and happiness, inhabit one spot more than all others in a world whose allotments are so difficult to estimate, it is the vicarage in the bosom of that rural upland.
We left B—— at twelve in the Brighton “Age”—the “swell coach” of England. We were to dine thirty miles nearer London, at —— Park, and we did the distance in exactly three hours, including a stop of fifteen minutes to dine. We are abused by all travellers for our alacrity in dining on the road; but what stage-coach in the United States ever limited its dining time to fifteen minutes, and what American dinner of roast, pastry, and cheese, was ever dispatched so briefly? Yet the travellers to Brighton are of the better class; and whose who were my fellow passengers the day I refer to were particularly well-dressed and gentlemanly—yet all of them achieved a substantial dinner of beef, pudding, and cheese, paid their bills, and drained their glass of porter, within the quarter of an hour. John Bull’s blindness to the beam in his own eye is perhaps owing to the fact that this hasty meal is sometimes called a “lunch!”