An eminent clergyman one evening became the subject of conversation, and a wonder was expressed that he had never married. “That wonder,” said Miss Porter, “was once expressed to the reverend gentleman himself, in my hearing, and he told a story in answer which I will tell you—and perhaps, slight as it may seem, it is the history of other hearts as sensitive and delicate as his own. Soon after his ordination, he preached once every Sabbath, for a clergyman in a village not twenty miles from London. Among his auditors, from Sunday to Sunday, he observed a young lady, who always occupied a certain seat, and whose close attention began insensibly to grow to him an object of thought and pleasure. She left the church as soon as service was over, and it so chanced that he went on for a year without knowing her name; but his sermon was never written without many a thought how she would approve it, nor preached with satisfaction unless he read approbation in her face. Gradually he came to think on her at other times than when writing sermons, and to wish to see her on other days than Sundays; but the weeks slipped on, and though he fancied she grew paler and thinner, he never brought himself to the resolution either to ask her name, or to seek to speak with her. By these silent steps, however, love had worked into his heart, and he had made up his mind to seek her acquaintance and marry her, if possible, when one day he was sent for to minister at a funeral. The face of the corpse was the same that had looked up to him Sunday after Sunday, till he had learned to make it a part of his religion and his life. He was unable to perform the service, and another clergyman present officiated; and after she was buried, her father took him aside, and begged his pardon for giving him pain—but he could not resist the impulse to tell him that his daughter had mentioned his name with her last breath, and he was afraid that a concealed affection for him had hurried her to the grave. Since that, said the clergyman in question, my heart has been dead within me, and I look forward only. I shall speak to her in heaven.”
London is wonderfully embellished within the last three years—not so much by new buildings, public or private, but by the almost insane rivalry that exists among the tradesmen to outshow each other in the expensive magnificence of their shops. When I was in England before, there were two or three of these palaces of columns and plate-glass—a couple of shawl shops, and a glass warehouse or two, but now the west end and the city have each their scores of establishments, of which you would think the plate-glass alone would ruin any body but Aladdin. After an absence of a month from town lately, I gave myself the always delightful treat of an after-dinner ramble among the illuminated palaces of Regent street and its neighborhood, and to my surprise found four new wonders of this description—a shawl house in the upper Regent’s Circus, a silk mercer’s in Oxford street, a whip maker’s in Regent street, and a fancy stationer’s in the Quadrant—either of which establishments fifty years ago would have been the talk of all Europe. The first-mentioned warehouse lines one of the quarters of the Regent Circus, and turns the corner of Oxford street with what seems but one window—a series of glass plates, only divided by brass rods, reaching from the ground to the roof—window panes twelve feet high, and four or five feet broad! The opportunity which this immense transparency of front gives for the display of goods is proportionately improved; and in the mixture of colors and fabrics to attract attention there is evidently no small degree of art—so harmonious are the colors and yet so gorgeous the show. I see that several more renovations are taking place in different parts of both “city” and “town;” and London promises, somewhere in the next decimals, to complete its emergence from the chrysalis with a glory to which eastern tales will be very gingerbread matters indeed.
If I may judge by my own experience and by what I can see in the streets, all this night-splendor out of doors empties the playhouses—for I would rather walk Regent street of an evening than see ninety-nine plays in a hundred; and so think apparently multitudes of people, who stroll up and down the clean and broad London sidewalks, gazing in at the gorgeous succession of shop-windows, and by the day-bright glare of the illumination extending nods and smiles—the street, indeed, becoming gradually a fashionable evening promenade, as cheap as it is amusing and delightful. There are large classes of society, who find the evenings long in their dingy and inconvenient homes, and who must go somewhere; and while the streets were dark, and poorly paved and lighted, the play-house was the only resort where they could beguile their cares with splendor and amusement, and in those days theatricals flourished, as in these days of improved thoroughfares and gay shops they evidently languish. I will lend the hint to the next essayist on the “Decline of the Drama.”
The increased attractiveness of London, from thus disclosing the secrets of its wondrous wealth, compensates in a degree for what increases as rapidly on me—the distastefulness of the suburbs, from the forbidding and repulsive exclusiveness of high garden walls, impermeable shrubberies, and every sort of contrivance for confining the traveller to the road, and nothing but the road. What should we say in America to travelling miles between two brick walls, with no prospect but the branches of overhanging trees from the invisible park lands on either side, and the alley of cloudy sky overhead?—How tantalizing to pass daily by a noble estate with a fine specimen of architecture in its centre, and see no more of it than a rustic lodge and some miles of the tops of trees over a paling! All this to me is oppressive—I feel abridged of breathing room and eyesight—deprived of my liberty—robbed of my horizon. Much as I admire high preservation and cultivation, I would almost compromise for a “snake fence” in this part of England.
On a visit to a friend a week or two since in the neighborhood of London, I chanced, during a long walk, to get a glimpse over the wall of a nicely-gravelled and secluded path, which commanded what the proprietor’s fence enviously shut from the road—a noble view of London and the Thames. Accustomed to see people traversing my own lawn and fields in America without question, as suits their purpose, and tired of the bricks, hedges, and placards of blacking and pills, I jumped the fence, and with feelings of great relief and expansion aired my eyes and my imagination in the beautiful grounds of my friend’s opulent neighbor. The Thames, with its innumerable steamers, men-of-war, yachts, wherries, and ships—a vein of commercial and maritime life lying between the soft green meadows of Kent and Essex—formed a delicious picture of contrast and meaning beauty, which I gazed on with great delight for—some ten minutes. In about that time I was perceived by Mr. B——’s gardener, who, with a very pokerish stick in his hand, came running toward me, evidently by his pace, prepared for a vigorous pursuit of the audacious intruder. He came up to where I stood, quite out of breath, and demanded, with a tight grasp of his stick, what business I had there. I was not very well prepared with an answer, and short of beating the man for his impudence, (which in several ways might have been a losing job,) I did not see my way very clearly out of Mr. B.’s grounds. My first intention, to call on the proprietor and apologise for my intrusion while I complained of the man’s insolence, was defeated by the information, evidently correct, that Mr. B—— was not resident at the place, and so I was walked out of the lodge gate with a vagabond’s warning—never to let him “catch me there again.” So much for my liberal translation of a park fence.
This spirit of exclusion makes itself even more disagreeably felt where a gentleman’s paling chances to include any natural curiosity. One of the wildest, as well as most exquisitely beautiful spots on earth is the Dargle, in the county Wicklow, in Ireland. It is interesting, besides, as belonging to the estate of the orator and patriot Grattan. To get to it, we were let through a gate by an old man, who received a douceur: we crossed a newly reaped field, and came to another gate; another person opened this, and we paid another shilling. We walked on toward the glen, and in the middle of the path, without any object apparently but the toll, there was another locked gate, and another porter to pay; and when we made our exit from the opposite extremity of the grounds, after seeing the Dargle, there was a fourth gate and a fourth porter. The first field and fee belonged, if I remember rightly, to a Captain Somebody, but the other three gates belong to the present Mr. Grattan, who is very welcome to my three shillings, either as a tribute to his father’s memory, or to the beauty of Tinnehinch and the Dargle. But on whichever ground he pockets it, the mode of assessment is, to say the least, ungracious. Without subjecting myself to the charge of a mercenary feeling, I think I may say that the enthusiasm for natural scenery is very much clipped and belittled by seeing it at a shilling the perch—paying the money and taking the look. I should think no sum lost which was expended in bringing me to so romantic a glen as the Dargle; but it should be levied somewhere else than within sound of its wild waterfall—somewhere else than between the waterfall and the fine mansion of Tinnehinch.
The fish most “out of water” in the world is certainly a Frenchman in England without acquaintances. The illness of a friend has lately occasioned me one or two hasty visits to Brighton; and being abandoned on the first evening to the solitary mercies of the coffee-room of the hotel, I amused myself not a little with watching the ennui of one of these unfortunate foreigners who was evidently there simply to qualify himself to say that he had been at Brighton in the season. I arrived late, and was dining by myself at one of the small tables, when I became aware that some one at the other end of the room was watching me very steadily. The place was as silent as coffee-rooms usually are after the dinner hour, the rustling of newspapers the only sound that disturbed the digestion of eight or ten persons present, when the unmistakeable call of “Vaitare!” informed me that if I looked up I should encounter the eyes of a Frenchman. The waiter entered at the call, and after a considerable parley with my opposite neighbor, came over to me and said in rather an apologetic tone, “Beg pardon, sir, but the shevaleer wishes to know if your name is Coopair.” Not very much inclined, fatigued as I was, for a conversation in French, which I saw would be the result of a polite answer to his question, I merely shook my head, and took up the newspaper. The Frenchman drew a long sigh, poured out his last glass of claret, and crossing his thumbs on the edge of the table, fell into a profound study of the grain of the mahogany.
What with dawdling over coffee and tea and reading half a dozen newspapers, I whiled away the time till ten o’clock, pitying occasionally the unhappy chevalier who exhibited every symptom of a person bored to the last extremity. One person after another called for a bedroom candle, and exit finally the Frenchman himself, making me, however, a most courteous bow as he passed out. There were two gentlemen left in the room, one a tall and thin old man of seventy, the other a short and portly man of fifty or thereabouts, both quite bald. They rose together and came to the fire near which I was sitting.